Community champions extend an invitation
Amplifying Voices Pakistan were recently invited to Nowshera in KPK by an enthusiastic group of socially-minded people who want to learn what community-centred media is all about and how they could implement it locally.
We call people like these, “community champions” – and we rarely embark on a new venture without them! So on 6 June, our friends Hazeen and Khalid at Amplifying Voices Pakistan went to Nowshera to run a “taster day”.
The participants got fully involved in examples of community-centred media activities and associated community engagement tools. They invited Hazeen and Khalid to return and visit a couple of their villages where they felt community-centred media projects could make an impact.
So the following weekend, they went back and held a “Stakeholder Consultation”. This is an event for local community champions to introduce other community members and local service providers to community-centred media. It is important that the wider community also buys-in to a project, as it will rely mainly on community volunteers and locally donated services and resources to keep running in the long term. Stakeholder consultations help everybody involved to manage expectations before launching into a project together. Hazeen says,
“the people involved should have real compassion for their community, because this leads to a shared responsibility for the project, and also to more meaningful engagement from service providers.”
Amplifying Voices Pakistan team driving to Community Consultation event, June 2021
Hazeen was really pleased to find passion for social justice and development as he visited the villages. In one place, they visited a women’s clinic which has a woman doctor visiting regularly. The clinic had been set up by a local leader. The team heard that the same person had also set up a local school to help girls access education. This local leader said that he hoped a media project would not just be an on-air exercise with all talk and no action, because a lot of practical work needs to done in the village, for example to improve the quality of the clinic. This gave Hazeen opportunity to explain the importance of community-centred media in bringing together on-air and off-air activities. He said –
“You are doing a lot of good things but not many people know about it. Community-centred media would get the story out. And the story of your good work will inspire more people to get involved.”
A women’s clinic set up by local community members.
The village stakeholders invited Amplifying Voices Pakistan to go back in the next few weeks to run full community consultations and community-centred media workshops. It’s early days in the Nowshera district but things look very positive. As the story develops, you can follow via the tag #NowsheraCCM on our Facebook page or on Amplifying Voices Pakistan’s own Facebook page.