The Communication Initiative
Development action with informed and engaged societies
The Communication Initiative

After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. 

Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future. 

On the transfer, co-founder Victoria Martin expressed her pleasure to see this work continue under Wits' leadership, knowing that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction. 

As Wits, we honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades and look forward building from that strong base. This includes co-founders Warren Feek (1953-2024) and Victoria Martin as well as La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA), which continues independently at lainiciativadecomunicacion.com with links to The CI Global site. We are also eager to forge new partnerships and entertain new ideas as we consider how best to contribute to social and behaviour change in our rapidly evolving environment.

If you are joining the International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Panama, please join Wits and CILA on Monday, 22 June, to share your thoughts and suggestion for the relaunch of the Communication Initiative. We will be in Pacifica 5 from 12-1:25 for the Refuel, Reflect, and Renew Lunch Series: The Communication Initiative: celebrating a driving force for Communication for Social Change and the way forward. We will reflect on the legacy of Warren Feek and family in creating the Communication Initiative, consider the contributions of CI over the years and then turn our attention towards the future in this dynamic session. 

If you are unable to join us in Panama, we still want to hear from you. Please contribute your thoughts by following this link: https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026 or reaching out to ci_surveys@commint.com. 

You can also follow the QR Code:

 https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026

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Focuss.info

3 comments
This collaborative online initiative is designed to provide a starting point on the internet for qualitative research in the field of international development cooperation and studies. It centres around a web-based search engine meant to support the work of practitioners, researchers, students, and all others interested in global development studies. The effort was launched in 2007 by the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (Netherlands); it has since been developed by a loose network of approximately 25 international think tanks.
Communication Strategies

Focuss.info draws on the participation of development practitioners seeking to use the internet as a means to facilitate research and the sharing of knowledge amongst those working in the same field. It is is intended to serve as an alternative to traditional/generic search engines in that it indexes a specific choice of electronic resources that are selected by librarians, researchers, and practitioners working in participating institutions. The resources are selected based on their relevance for development studies and the quality of the information. Organisers are encouraging their peers to record their favourite websites related to international development - not on local computers, but in social bookmark accounts which are freely available on the internet. The goal is to draw upon others' online discoveries in an effort to automatically index the websites that have been saved by colleagues, and then to make the selected websites full-text-retrievable through the Focuss.info search engine.

The web-based initiative also features tools to customise content to each user's preferences. An interactive map enables visitors to the site to see where peers using the site are located. A discussion forum features topics such as "The Gender Dimension of Sustainable Development".

Sources

Email from Richard Lalleman to The Communication Initiative on October 26 2007; and Focuss.info website.

Comments

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 06/21/2008 - 08:10 Permalink

Focuss is a portal for quick reference of research activities.

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 04:24 Permalink

Really nice resource, gives you alot of current materia inside the field.

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 04/24/2008 - 01:31 Permalink

It will even be better if we got more companions that help us build and share more resources on Early childhood development.