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Support rural development through communication

We have been involved in many projects with a significant rural development component. It is an interesting area to work in, plagued by prejudice and full of unresolved issues, but with room for meaningful projects and creativity.

Romania's countryside is also a land of contrast: beautiful landscapes and heaps of garbage; interesting people and mass migration to the city or abroad; industrious mayors and cropless fields. The red line that unfortunately binds it all together is poverty.  Some money, obviously not enough, has been invested by the government, by the EU and the World Bank. We worked with some of these donors, in particular DFID (UK Government's Department for International Development).

One of the most interesting experiences was making a film for DFID, who wanted to show the Brussels officials a subsistence farmer. Our client, Chris Allinson, DFID's rural development advisor, said it was time the people in Brussels saw the faces behind their numbers and strategies. Laurentiu Calciu, our film maker, traveled to Vaslui and visited several villages right before the harvest. After a few days, he found his character, Nea Tudor, an 80 year old farmer who lived off his land with his wife and horse. The film is about him and if you are curious, you can see it here.

DFID also commission us to write a book about their most important project in Romania, called The Local and Regional Partnership Development Programme (LRPD). LRPD was originally conceived as a way of demonstrating how public institutions could work more closely with people to stimulate economic and social development, reduce poverty, and social exclusion, through an inclusive regional development process. It was decided that the main focus would be in the counties of Botosani and Vaslui and to work with the North-East Regional Development Agency; which is the public body responsible for coordinating regional planning in that region.

The main purpose of this book was to promote the idea of partnership as a useful methodology – as well as a requirement for managing EU funds – and we decided that the best way to present this was to interview people who are actually working on building such partnerships. But partnership is a subject which can seem dull and irrelevant to most people, and we had to come up with a way of presenting it that somehow brought the subject to life, and showed that this methodology is not only interesting, but may well be useful as a means of dealing with a wide range of challenges. We couldn't just present a list of projects in partnership, or a list of rules about how to run a partnership group; it had to be different, and interesting.

What better way to "package" the story of partnership than in the context of people's personal experiences. The subject is presented here by people whose backgrounds and current work is really interesting, and it gives us the opportunity to look at partnership from different points of view. In this book we get insights from the strategic, social, economic, rural and personal points of view. Hopefully the book will be a useful guide for those who want to learn about partnership and know how to value the opinion of others. You can download it here.

If you would like to know what we think about rural development we encourage you to look at this article --  Traveling into the unknown -- and we would be most grateful if you would leave a comment at the end of it.

Links

The Little Farmers film

The Partners for Europe Book

Rural development blog post, Traveling into the unknown