Welcome to the first Southern African Communication for Change Conference. We are delighted to host the conference of its kind in Southern Africa, where we bring together communication practitioners to share experience and learn from each other.

Our vision is to build a community of practice with people from civil society, funders, NGOs, government and the creative industries who have a shared understanding of the power of communication to bring about positive change. We want to have the capability and strength to use communication to bring leadership and innovation to transformation. To do this we must be disruptive, curious, smart and effective.

The thrust of most of the work we do in Change Communication is to advance the Sustainability Development Goals, the international framework for delivering wide ranging improvements in the lives of billions of people. As communicators we need to be able to use and develop our skills to drive these goals through articulating our stories and supporting positive, empowered action amongst individuals, communities and governments, be it for health, environmental protection, education, food security or gender rights.

We as a community need to talk more and do more. We work in field in which we have diminishing rather than increasing resources at a time of the greatest need. We need to immerse ourselves in innovation and commit to open collaboration. We need to look outwards towards the many people and organisations around the world that are doing game-changing work and inwards towards ourselves and how we can work smarter with rigour and precision.

We should dissolve the lines between ourselves and our target audiences, so that we stop designing for them, but with them as active collaborators. We need to use participatory models that enable organisations – from school clubs to government departments – to tell their stories and create communication that amplifies transformation agendas.

We are infusing the conference with this spirit. We want to avoid sessions built around power point presentations and offer sessions designed around story-telling, skills building, knowledge sharing and problem solving, placing the process of creative, engaged communication at the heart of the conference itself. So please, join us, and come along for the ride.