Bright Home – Sakkar Rohi
Our partner, Amplifying Voices Pakistan is working with a Bagri community in a village near Sakkar Rohi, to create new opportunies for women and young people. Bright Home (or Roshni-ro-Ghar in Bagri) is a project that integrates community-centred media with vocational skills classes and other off-air activities.
Bright Home creates livelihood opportunities through vocational skills classes and creates opportunities for households to learn from health professionals and other experts on issues they want to learn about. Media training provides women an additional route for building skills, self confidence, and for participating more widely in community life and wider society.
Community-centred audio programmes are co-produced with village members, and reflect the type of conversations that go on in the sewing classes. The programmes also bring in guests with expertise to comment on stories and questions raised by villagers. Content promotes social developments, good health and hygiene, and supports livelihood development.
Bright Home programmes are played via “speakerboxes” in listener groups in the village and as villagers grow confident in making content, they are also aired via local radio extending some benefits of the local project to other communities without losing the deep engagement with one single community.
Background:
Lazur Chohan heard about Bright Home in another community from a WhatsApp group in June 2023 and invited Amplifying Voices Pakistan to help set up a Bright Home project in his area. While exploring the concept with a Marwari community in Cholistan in summer 2024, floods hit a Bagri community in nearby Sakkar Rohi. Lazur Chohan responded with relief items and by airing the stories of the Bagri community on local radio. At the same time the Marwari community decided not to continue with Bright Home and the Bagri community invited Lazur to move the project to Sakkar Rohi, to support their recovery from the floods.
Bright Home projects start slowly with the aim to build foundations for trust, exploring and creating livelihood opportunities and addressing pressing health concerns before moving on to more challenging activities like media.
During earlier projects in we found that media activities can be sensitive. Local power-brokers are suspicious when minority figures suddenly gain prominence. Working primarily with minority Bagri people in a multi-ethnic region, Roshni-ro-Ghar activities encourage participation from across the Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities.
Our Role:
Provide support to Amplifying Voices Pakistan for project planning, including funding proposals and design of participatory community-based research and learning.