Information alone does not ensure sustainable development. People and communities also need to be actively engaged in the processes, and their participation should be harnessed through communications activities designed for development purposes. Who should be made responsible for initiating these activities? What are the best conditions for launching them? What are the limits of these communications activities, and more importantly, do they generate benefits for community development? This book reports on an action-research conducted in West Africa by 23 centres de lecture et d'animation culturelle (CLAC). The aim of the research was to determine whether the centres' communication activities could become part of their curricula to enlarge their mandate and transform them into real community development tools.