The role of pain in communication for social change has not been theorised. Yet pain is key to motivating the humanitarian concern to use communication for social change practices to influence how people live. Notions of pain are also appealed to when communication for social change practitioners develop and implement their messaging. With a bent towards scholarship and concerns of African provenance, this chapter examines the concept of pain in parallel with the related history and development of communication for social change. In doing this, a critique is offered of the dominant development paradigm, which is centred around modernity. This chapter hence calls for another way of practicing communication for the common good, by pointing out the need for rigorous consideration of the work that pain does, in view of the ways in which pain is unsharable.