Participation or the popular

This paper is an extension of a rural communication project by Unesco/IPDC and the Finnish International Development Agency FINNIDA, focusing on nine villages in northern Tanzania. The project was given the name Commedia, an abbreviation of "Community Media for Rural Development". Its aim was to promote grassroots communication and dialogue between the village and nation-level media. It was originally envisioned as a pilot experiment for a huge programme, finally covering all the 8,000 villages in Tanzania and shifting the urban bias in Tanzanian mass communication. The project did not work out quite in the way it was planned. The Commedia story includes the ups and downs of an exercise seeking a balance between idealism and a cruel and capricious reality, not always responding to set objectives in the way planned in the project document (Kivikuru et al, forthcoming).