This research sets out to understand how communication can facilitate participatory development to improve poor people’s lives using the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) in Jamkhed, India as a case study. For three and a half decades, CRHP has been using a holistic development approach for enhancing people’s health and well-being. CRHP helps poor families improve health through promotion and diffusion of new information, and through different communication practices empowers communities. Thus, communication is used at two levels: to provide new information and to engage people in a dialogue that leads to positive community action. The research used theoretical constructs guiding participatory communication such as critical thinking and problematization as a means for empowerment (Freire, 1970, 1973), the role of the communicator as a facilitator in orchestrating social change (White, 1999) and the role of para-professional aides and change agents in fostering the diffusion of new information and ideas for social change (Rogers, 2003). Two-months of fieldwork, conducted in six villages in the Jamkhed region, used multiple ethnographic methods.
The research concludes that communication processes using Freirean principles can contribute towards empowering poor people if conducted over a long period. Participatory communication and collective action can be successful if change agents act as facilitators and are sensitive to people’s needs. Furthermore, the research indicates that genuine participation is slow and social change is even slower. It also concludes that participatory development and empowerment are dialectical processes that rely on dissemination of expert knowledge and an open dialogue between experts and local people. CRHP shows that empowerment is possible if the project staff, change agents and community members are motivated and willing to continuously change and adapt to the environment, and also challenge oppressive social and political practices. The research concludes that communication practices are important in organizing people to come together and to seek social change, but larger political and structural changes are also necessary to complement individual and community-level actions.