07 Jul 2026 “No one is voiceless”: WACC urges field of social and behavior change to put community knowledge at center
“It’s time to stop saying ‘giving a voice to the voiceless’.”
The conference room in Panama City was packed with thousands of communication practitioners for the opening of the International Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) Summit 2026. WACC’s director of programmes, Lorenzo Vargas, had a challenge for them – retire a phrase the field has leaned on for decades.
“No one is voiceless. What people lack are platforms to be heard. Our job is to build them.”
The call to action rang throughout the Summit’s opening plenary, “Local, Ancestral, and Cultural Approaches to SBCC,” moderated by Vargas.
Launching the Summit’s reflections under its theme “The Power of Connection,” the session brought together five leaders working at the intersection of community communication, Indigenous knowledge, and social change: Omayra Casamá, an Emberá leader from Panama; Yutsu Maiche, a Shuar communicator from Ecuador; Soraya Bayuelo Castellar from the Colectivo de Comunicaciones de Montes de María in Colombia; and Prof. Adebayo Fayoyin, chair of the African Society for Social and Behavior Change from Nigeria and South Africa.
Facing hard truths
Though they came from very different contexts, the panelists kept returning to the same hard truths:
- Indigenous and traditional communities already govern themselves, each in their own way, and already communicate – even when those systems are invisible to outsiders.
- When governments and development agencies arrive in a territory, the burden is on them to understand existing systems of self-government and adapt, not on communities to bend to external models.
- SBCC that fails to build on what communities are already doing is condemned to fail over the long run.
The conversation also pressed the SBCC field to rethink what counts as valid knowledge and evidence.
The dominant model still sidelines the knowledge and ways of knowing of grassroots and Indigenous communities, the panel emphasized. Without these, interventions lack local roots and local legitimacy.
From technical fixes to community voices, knowledge & care
Hosted by a consortium of international and local partners including UNICEF, the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, and The Centre for Communication and Social Impact, the Summit acts as primary global event for driving sustainable social and behavior change.
WACC’s presence there went beyond the opening plenary. Two of our members and partners took part as panelists in their own right, bringing community-rooted perspectives to debates on health, environment, and storytelling.
Jose Luis Aguirre, director of Office of Education and Communication for Development (SECRAD) of the Bolivian Catholic University (UCB) in La Paz, made the case during the session “Planetary Health in Action: Mobilizing Systems for Collective Resilience” for going beyond technical fixes. Communities must be able use their communication rights and local knowledge alongside legal frameworks to defend their territories and ways of life.
He highlighted the need to strengthen the communication skills of Indigenous leaders, interested youth, and practicing communicators, a need reaffirmed in the WACC-supported “Listening to the Voices of the Amazon” project SECRAD is leading.
These community members are then able to advocate for the defense and care of nature through ethical and technically responsible practices.
The importance of this work lies in protecting both the Amazon’s freshwater resources, the world’s largest, and its fauna and flora, the greatest diversity of animal and plant species on the planet – as well as the Indigenous peoples who have inhabited the region since before colonization, Aguirre explained.
“Twenty of Bolivia’s 36 Indigenous peoples have lived here for generations, drawing strength from their knowledge, cultures, and values, which have long safeguarded their socio-environmental surroundings.”
Meet-up with WACC member from Panama
Lorenzo Vargas (middle) met with Claudia Figueroa (left) and Nicole Genald (right) of WACC member Centro de Comunicación y Derechos during the Summit to discuss shared priorities around community communication and communication rights and to explore future collaboration. Photo: WACC
Noting that SECRAD’s educational initiative with communicators responds to the call of Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si’, Aguirre said that “it allows us to develop an approach to ecology and holistic communication.”
“It is not just about caring for nature, but also for the human beings who live in and interact with it – in a region [the Amazon] that covers 70 percent of the entire national territory.”
Aguirre reported as a particular achievement that Bolivian civil society, after much advocacy, succeeded in having an article incorporated into the country’s constitution that recognizes communication as a human right and, by extension, acknowledges community broadcasting.
System shifters: Communities telling their stories
Pia Rieublanc of WACC’s partner La Sandia Digital in Mexico spoke to the power of participatory, community-centred storytelling – stories owned by the communities that tell them, rather than extracted from them – as a driver of lasting change.
Such communication processes “can definitely change the communication landscape, itself a system, by enabling people to exercise their communication rights and letting marginalized voices be heard,” she explained during the session “Stories That Shift Systems: Advancing Inclusion, Equity, and Voice through Storytelling.”
Stories have the power to generate emotions and life-changing epiphanies, but if these emotions are to bring about systemic change, they must be coupled with social impact campaigns and concrete calls to action, Rieublanc said.
“We need to create a long-term relationship with the audience who has been moved by our stories and invite them to be our allies even after the story has ended.” She noted that this is all the more important in today’s context of social media where people may watch dozens of stories a day on Instagram and quickly move from an emotion to another.
“When we launch a documentary, we create an impact campaign, not to promote the movie in itself but to create a dialogue with the audience, through debates, screenings in specific institutions, cultural events, educational material,” Rieublanc said by way of an example.
Communities leading social change
“The week in Panama reaffirmed a conviction at the heart of WACC’s Communication for All work,” Vargas said.
“This is that communication is a right and that lasting social change must be led by communities themselves – building on the knowledge, systems, and platforms they already have and creating the new platforms they still need.”
Top image: WACC’s Lorenzo Vargas (far left) moderates the opening plenary of the International SBCC Summit 2026 in Panama City. Middle: Jose Luis Aguirre of WACC member SECRAD holds up a copy of the Constitution of Bolivia during the “Planetary Health in Action” session. Bottom: Pia Rieublanc of WACC partner La Sandia Digital speaks during the “Stories That Shift Systems” session. All photos: WACC.
WACC’s participation in the International SBCC Summit 2026 took place under the Communication for All Programme and was made possible by support from Bread for the World-Germany .
This article was initially drafted with AI assistance and subsequently reviewed and edited by staff.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.