Shaping policy processes through citizen voice in Francophone West Africa: the arts as a vehicle for knowledge co-construction

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This networking activity convenes research, policy, cultural and community engagement organisations from across Sahelian Francophone West Africa. In this context, many citizens have minimal opportunity to contribute to governance processes, and their voices are seldom heard in deliberative spaces. Meanwhile, creative and artistic methods such as music and drawing have been used elsewhere to represent citizen voice to policy, in ways which could be conceptualised as storytelling, such as photovoice, digital storytelling or participatory filmmaking. Co-creation of such outputs often occurs between participants and researchers. As a rich tradition of storytelling exists in West Africa, this network aims to discover whether artistic and cultural methods can be used similarly here and, going further, whether policy makers themselves can engage with communities and artists to co-create understanding about issues of mutual concern.The core group of interdisciplinary researchers from five research institutions will map policy and civil society stakeholders, as well as arts professionals. A subset will be interviewed to understand the conditions under which artistic co-creation could be possible. A further subset of interviewees will be invited to convene the wider network and participate in a workshop, where the answers to these questions, and to the overall research objective, will be debated. Part of the workshop will involve an activity where policy makers and community and advocacy representatives attempt to co-create understanding about an issue of concern through a pre-determined but flexible creative activity, facilitated by artists, termed 'storytellers' in the context of this activity and workshop. The answers to questions and the results of the debate will be processed by IDS into a working paper and a policy brief. The artists will work to create a communicable set of outputs from the creative activity. These will be publicised through traditional and modern media, from radio to Instagram. Thereby, awareness of the agenda will be raised among other relevant organisation, who may be able to participate in researching them further, or adapting the techniques trialled in the practical domain.Capacity of the network members will be raised, but through the dissemination activities, the wider public and policy, advocacy and research communities will become aware of the network and the potentials for developing this kind of work.