Abstract
The global landscape for development communication and social change has changed radically in the new millennium. Among the most significant of these changes is the international consensus on the importance of setting transnational targets for socio-economic developments across the globe, as expressed in the eight objectives that constitute the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In 2000, the global coalition of 193 leaders committed to focus their concerted energies on addressing poverty, primary education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, HIV/AIDS and other diseases, environmental sustainability, and global partnerships. What was glaringly missing in this commitment was the recognition that communication is the catalyst and engine that drives positive socio-economic changes locally, regionally, and globally. In 2015, we witnessed the formulation of the 17 successor Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through a more inclusive process that involved multiple stakeholders, but communication was still left out of the lofty focal goals. This has necessitated the call for “Communication for All” to stress the centrality and urgency of communication in serious development and social change enterprises. In this chapter, we provide a short background on the MDGs and SDGs, as a backdrop for explaining Communication for All before we argue why it matters, especially in the African development context. We argue that Communication for All could have been the 18th SDG, but now that it is not the case, strategic communication deserves to be a clear component of all the 17 SDGs. The binding constraints of African development present perplexing and multifactorial challenges that deserve more attention than they get now from within the continent. More than any other world region, Africa needs “Communication for All” to pervade all aspects of human engagement on the continent.
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Okigbo, C.C., Ogbodo, J.N. (2023). Communication for All in Africa: The Complexities of Development and Communication. In: Servaes, J., Yusha'u, M.J. (eds) SDG18 Communication for All, Volume 2. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19459-7_2
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