I took this photo in Inyi village, Oduma, Enugu State, Nigeria.
These women were singing.
Not performing. Not posing. Singing because a development program had changed their lives so profoundly, they wrote it a praise song.
“Fadama: poverty has run away. There is no more poverty.”
I was there documenting the World Bank’s Fadama Development Project for a feature story. The programme supported rice farmers, many of them women, with tools, crop insurance, and production support. Simple inputs. Transformative outcomes.
One woman, Regina, told me the programme meant her children could now go to school.
Another, Nolly, the community’s women’s leader, said: “Before Fadama, the women in the village looked lean. Now we all look robust.”
I never forgot that line.
Not because it was quotable, but because it revealed something a logframe never could.
This is what impact looks like when it is documented with presence. Not as a statistic, but as a moment in someone’s life that you were trusted to witness.
And here’s what I’ve carried from that field visit into every piece of communications work I’ve done since:
The story is always there.
In the village hall.
In the praise song.
In the quiet pride of a woman who can now pay her child’s school fees.
Our job as communicators, as development professionals, as institutions, is to go looking for it. With the right questions. With the right presence. With genuine respect for what we are being invited into.
The data will make it into the report.
The story is what makes people believe.
This is why Iwà Consulting exists. And it is why, twenty years later, I am still going looking.