Interview: Oscar Perez

The organization “Comunicándonos – Communication for Development Foundation”, from El Salvador, was set up by a group of professionals from different areas to promote citizenship through the democratization of information. In this interview, Oscar Perez, its president, discusses the organization’s communication strategy and explains how it plans to influence local development.

Why does communication influence development?
It helps strengthen the organizational, institutional, economic and social processes of communities. The creation of communication strategies is crucial for the local and regional development of communities. Working with communication is a systematic and planned process of gathering and sharing information, knowledge and experiences. It strengthens the skills and capacities of people and groups. This enables an organized community to creatively embrace information and communication methodologies and technologies and use them to start a process of mobilization to solve the problems they face.

How does the Comunicándonos Foundation work?
Developing communication processes that democratize news and information. The Foundation’s goal is for these processes to maximize and strengthen the protagonism and leadership of men and women, youth and children from the community. By employing strategic communication actions, we plan to improve the ability of these people to influence their socio-economic environment and shape values and attitudes.

How does this work in practice?
These processes are also aimed at generating the conditions to access the means of social communication, with an emphasis on radio, community TV and telecenters as technological centers that can connect and promote the development of communities with social, economic and environmental equality.

How can this project reach the greatest number of people?
We participate in the Cihuatán Consortium, which has three community radios and five community video groups associated with the Regional Network of Participative Media. This network covers seven municipalities, six of which are in the Department of San Salvador (the capital of El Salvador), and it already reaches nearly 400,000 people.

05/29/2006

Published in Interaction nº 16