Introduction

This section introduces the stages of the project’s research cycle. Here we present the methodology and methods developed with the community of Cham gi Wadu as part of a community investigation into modern slavery in Migori County – a rural area near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Whilst the research processes of the investigation outlined here focus on the collection of community stories and how community capacity and capabilty was enabled, it should be noted that the significance  of communication between academic researchers and community participants seeking to transform their communities is  discussed throughout.

Research planning with the community

It is in this spirit that we turn to an exploratory meeting with members of a community radio steering committee held at Rongo University, in August 2019. The committee was formed through the Community Media 4 Kenya (CM4K) partnership and comprises of representatives from a wide range of community groups. The purpose of the meeting was to determine levels of interest in a research project seeking to secure funding from the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). One of the outcomes of the meeting was the refinement of research question/problem so that the research proposal for this project was informed and shaped by local people thinking about local needs from the start.

Incorporating community perceptions and experiences into the design and implementation of the research processes in this way assisted in enabling an understanding between participants to emerge. It also facilitated the forming of ties and the development of trust within the emerging team of academic and community collaborators – an essential component of participatory action research (Bacon, Mendez & Brown, 2005). The adoption of a flexibile development approach to community research in this way, enabled us to meet the requirements of the AKN Phase 2 call to ‘investigate modern slavery as a development challenge’. This is discussed later in the blog.

The meeting resolved that the aim of the project should be to capture and share community stories of modern slavery in Migori County, Kenya by drawing on the community networks (Day, 2008) of local participants. Applying their experiences as part of the CM4K partnership, the meeting decided  to synthesise community media storytelling practices with community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches or community media based participatory research (CmBPR) in this context. In addition to expressing their enthusiasm to be part of the project, the meeting also voiced its desire to raise awareness of the dangers of modern slavery whilst advocating for meaningful policy change.

The synthesis of community media practices with CBPR methods is not entirely new to development programmes. However, the ‘community development through community media’ ethos of this project is often undervalued, misunderstood and oft times ignored by many in academic research, funding and policy circles. By blending community voices and conscientisation (Freire, 1972) with capacity and capability building activities, the project team believe that communities: 1) have the potential to empower themselves and transform their communities and; 2) can build public awareness and campaign to effect meaningful social change.

The expected outcomes of the collection of community stories, it is anticipated, will articulate the “political and social processes, sustainable change and collective action” (Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009, p.8) required to effect this social change. It was agreed that this be achieved by way of the community media based participatory practices (CmBPR). These would include  “liberating pedagogal” elements (Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009, p.8) – a community learning approach we call participatory learning workshops (PLWs)

Community media practices

In order to introduce community media practices as applied to the context of this project, we need to provide an understanding of community media and its purpose within a communications for development context (Manyozo, 2012).

Community media are sometimes viewed as communication initiatives located in the communities they serve but they are so much more that that. UNESCO argues that community media presents an alternative to public and commercial media and are driven by “the involvement and participation of community members and community decision-making bodies that demonstrate a sense of ownership about their own development agenda”. Through the incorporation of critically reflective community learning elements into the participatory community media practices of story elicitation, community participants are enabled to “become self-empowered to publicly express opinion, debate issues, carry out dialogue, promote culture, community history and language” and exist to create “pluralism, diversity of content, and the representation of a society’s different groups and interests”. (2021).

This echoes Howley, who suggests that community media affects community structures, social & economic relations & political processes through its communication forms and, as a field of inquiry, focuses on how communities appropriate media texts, practices and institutions (2010). In other words, communities appropriate media tools for community development processes in the community spaces they create through community media practices to attend to their distinctive needs & interests. This is the ethos that has guided us throughout the project.

As a project invesigating community perceptions and experiences of modern slavery (as a development challenge) such definitions of community media pose the question how community participants might become self-empowered to investigate modern slavery in the community; raise public awareness through community dialogue; and campaign to effect meaningful  policy change through community media practices? Over the past 7 years the University of Brighton has collaborated with the University of Rongo and more recently with the representatives from the community of Cham gi wadu on community media projects designed to build community capacity and capability in ways that provide platforms for diverse community voices and self-empowerment.This has formed the basis of the CM4K partnership and this informs the approach adopted in the investigation.

At this stage of the partnership, the first studio of a 2 studio community radio station is being tested. Students at Rongo University’s School of InfoComms are currently learning production and operation techniques with an agreed purpose of collaborating with and training community participants as part of their curriculum. It is intended that the community radio station will provide a platform for community dialogue; information and knowledge sharing; awareness raising and campaigning against modern slavery, among other community issues. The audio content collected in this project – stories, podcasts, discussions will be disseminated through local radio during this AKN Phase 2 project before the Phase reaches its conclusion.

In order to ensure that the multi-media content of the community stories could be collected and shared, the participants needed to develop the skills necessary to capture stories using a range of community media tools. As the stories in this investigation are also viewed as data for analysis, it is important that participants were also able to capture this data. This required training in the 3 stages of media production – pre-production, production and post-production. It also required training in CBPR techniques and tools.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR)

Building on the previous contextualisation of community media within a communications for development setting, this section provides an understanding of how CBPR contributes to the methodological approach of this investigation. The processes of what we term Community Media Based Participatory Research (CmBPR), i.e. the synthesis of community media practices with CBPR, are described and evaluated in the drop-down menu of the methodology pages above. For now, we focus on CBPR and how it contributes to community development, empowerment and capacity building.

Situating empowerment within an alternative development paradigm, Manyozo promotes the empowerment approach as promoting development from below, or community development (2012). Arguing that the specialised knowledge of local people is often disregarded by institutional experts and traditional power holders, he continues by reasoning that empowerment constitutes emancipation from oppression by adopting a Frierian approach to  community learning. Such liberatory education approaches problematise the future and challenge participants to engage in dialogue to reconstruct their lives. In this project this is achieved through the community developing an understanding of modern slavery in Migori County through CBPR approaches. This knowledge is subsequently shared through community media practices. The rest of this section discusses what we mean by CBPR.

Community participation is often presented in ways that suit the agenda of those organising an activity (Arnstein, 1969). In terms of the research cycle, it has been suggested that community participation needs to occur at each stage of a project (Shallwani & Mohammed, 2007; Tremblay et al, 2018) for it to be research as a process of community development. Such research creates knowledge and understanding of community members, events and environment for the purpose of social change. In essence the CmBPR used here enables community voices to be shared through community learning and change effected through social action. It is these processes in the research cycle that enable self-empowerment.

As the AKN directive is to undertake ‘research as a development challenge’, we took this to mean working with local community groups and organisations to achieve the objectives they set themselves. This required us to work alongside communities to achieve their goals – involving, “community members who are ‘living the issue under study’ as research team members. Their experiential knowledge can help safeguard against insensitive research practice, can serve to challenge traditional power imbalances between researchers and community members, and can increase data quality” (Ochocka & Janzen, 2007, p.332). However, these research processes go beyond collecting ‘good data’. Involving community members in this way assists in building skills (capacity) and relationships (networks) by collecting data together; learning from each other and reflecting critically on what is discovered.

The CmBPR approach adopted in this project mirrors the multi-pronged approach of Haque (2011). In that project community engagement centred around participatory action research blended with skill enhancing opportunities for multiple community stakeholders whilst offering student internships.

In the next sections we introduce and reflect on the methods we designed to build the capacities of community participants to conduct effective CmBPR for the purpose of facilitating community capability development to campaign against modern slavery through community media practices; community networking and social action.

Please see the Methodology drop-down menus above.