The sisters live in remote village in Punjab, Pakistan, where Amplifying Voices Pakistan recently started the “Roshan Ghar” (Bright Home) sewing centre, at which women can develop new skills and exercise their voice in addressing community matters.

After the first batch of participants enrolled in the Roshan Ghar training, the class teacher gave an update to Hazeen Latif, CEO of Amplifying Voices Pakistan. She told him one of the participating families is very poor and have neither enough to eat each day nor a bread winner in their family. The girls are known locally as “Six-Sister”. Two of them met the criteria to attend the sewing centre. The others wanted to enroll too but they were too young.

A few years previously when their father had died, poverty pushed their mother into leaving them behind to go and re-marry. The youngest of the six was only 3 years old at the time. Their mother lives a few km away from their village with her new husband who already has several children. The girls used to say that they hated her. Two of the girls come to the sewing centre regularly for lessons. The younger ones also come along with them as there is no one at home. They leave their home door open as it is broken. They don’t have any worries about not locking their home as they say “we have nothing to lose”. There is nothing in it that anyone would want to steal.

When they started coming to class, the middle girl asked the teacher, “Where is God for us? We live in one room which leaks when it rains. The rainwater not only comes from the roof but also through the walls. Even our floor level has sunk down. We have only one bed made locally from grass rope and a another smaller bed which is broken, where my elder sister sleeps. We often go to bed hungry, and we all sleep on one bed squeezed, unable to turn right or left. There is no extra thing to sit on or just for hanging out. Winter and summer are both a challenge for us. Where is God’s love for us? Many men young and older come into the house saying they want to look out for us, but we can tell in their eyes, their intentions are bad. We have an uncle, but he is also poor. Still, he feeds us and supports us from time to time.

However, more recently they say that they thank God for Roshan Ghar as they found respect and something to learn. “People gave us their used clothes but now, after Roshan Ghar sewing centre, one day we will wear new clothes.”

The Bright Home sewing class, Punjab (Amplifying Voices Pakistan 2023)

During the Roshan Ghar sewing classes, participants also listen to programmes on speakerboxes. The programmes are produced by members of their community with support from Amplifying Voices Pakistan. In addition to topics that directly support the vocational training, speakerbox programmes also include health advice and material for spiritual encouragement. The village has a mainly Christian population so the programmes start with a Christian devotional and later a short message. The six-sisters said Roshan Ghar changed their lives and thinking about God and love. They found peace in their hearts where they had been filled with rage and thoughts of revenge for what life has done to them. One of the girls is studying in a nearby school. She decided to start memorising the Gospel of Matthew.

Health worker interviews a community member during a health seminar, Punjab (Amplifying Voices Pakistan, 2023)

When Hazeen asked recently how the sisters were doing, the sewing centre teacher said, “When they started coming to sewing centre, they were shy and would stay quiet but now they talk and talk, enjoy what they do, and they’ve also made some good friends.

Amplifying Voices Pakistan offered to support the girls with new locally made beds and a pedestal fan. They also committed to help with fees for the sister who wanted to stay in school. Seeing that some small steps could be a big help, the community also felt inspired to help. The neighbours next door shared their electricity supply as the girls’ own supply had been cut due to non-payment. The elder sister also felt motivated and found a job selling SIM cards for a mobile company. It’s a tough job as she only earns on commission if she makes sales and some days she can come home having sold no cards. But she perseveres.

When Hazeen met them he asked, “what is your dream?”, they all looked at each other and quietly spoke; “we want to live a peaceful life and have our home fixed, nothing more.” The second oldest said “I want to study and study and study this is my dream.”

The little one, the youngest, said nothing but kept smiling.

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In a remote tribal village in Maharashtra a remarkable story is unfolding. It started with one village.  After a year, another one joined in.  Before too long there were thirty others, with new ones asking to join. None of the communities in these villages had ever met, but somehow they knew each other well, for they shared a common story – of challenge and adversity. But they were also connected through the Adivasi Voices Project, a  joint venture between local NGO, Seva and Amplifying Voices.

Sharing stories, coming together

For over a year these village communities have been listening to each other’s stories on speakerboxes, learning from each other and from experts too.  With support from the Seva team, people shared their stories, about overcoming addiction, escaping the trap of bonded labour, or how to start a kitchen garden. The communities not only inspired each other that change is possible, they also shared how.

Since before the pandemic many people from these communities had been asking Seva to set up a face-to-face meeting with other villages in the district, and so for the first time, last week, five communities came together, hosted by the village of Umburne.

“It was like meeting long-lost friends ,” said Ram, “we had so much to talk about, but most importantly we talked about the programmes we loved the most and the changes that have happened in our villages since we had the speakerboxes.”

Village-to-village transfer

Seva team leader, Shilpa described the gathering as being like a celebration of learning. As story after story was shared, Shilpa said she was so surprised to see how much faster change had come to the villages which had most recently received the speakerboxes, compared to those who had them at the beginning.  “They have adopted new ideas, attitudes and practices much more quickly than the first villages we started working in,” she said.  “Of course the communities have learned from the interviews with experts, but what has been most powerful is that the communities have been learning from each other,” she added, describing it as a “village-to-village transfer.”

Community members from five adivasi villages in Maharashtra share how stories and content on the speakerboxes have impacted their lives

The content on the speakerboxes is coordinated by the Seva team, however each programme is rooted in the heart of the village and the communities are involved in their design and creation.  Experts too are involved when important learning or information needs to be shared. The most popular programmes in all the villages, however were the dramas, which reflect village life and issues they all face. One lady, Trimbak, chuckled as she recounted how the family arguments she heard in the dramas were just like the arguments in her family.” Dattu, who was able to recite the dialogues in the dramas, said the programmes were in their language and exactly depicted their lives and situations.  Tulshi shared how the programme on early marriages had sparked a big conversation in his village, because they hadn’t allow girls to get an education above 4th standard. “But all that has changed,” he said, “Our entire village have decided that all our children should have an opportunity to have secondary education as well.”

After food and dancing the villagers said their farewells, agreeing that this should become a regular event and that more villages should be included in future.

For us, we have been reminded that lasting, sustainable change happens at the grassroots level. And that when change, no matter how small comes to one community, it can cause ripples of change in other communities.  Some of these ripples will intersect with other ripples to create waves which result in momentum and lasting impact.

The post Connecting Communities appeared first on Amplifying Voices.

Rokhan-e-Kore class, KPK, 2023

Sewing classes have been running now for several weeks and young girls who attend have told us that they have learned a lot. They can see how they will use these skills to earn money from their families. Some of the participants said they would be interested in learning computer and media skills. But there are challenges.

It started with a challenge to one of our own norms! We have a training mantra which you may have heard us say before: “Get your shoes dirty”. It’s a shorthand way of saying people should build trust and be relevant by getting out of their office or studio into the community to engage with people on the streets and in the markets. The women attending the sewing classes had picked up on this aspect of community-centred media, perhaps during discussion about community-centred media in the broader community during the AViD response to the floods last summer. When discussing the possibility of including media training in Rokhan-e-Kore, the participants said they couldn’t be involved if it meant going out to record interviews etc in the streets and markets of their own village and neighbouring places.  They said it has been a big thing for many of these women and girls to get permission from their families to attend Rokhan-e-Kore in a classroom outside their homes. They don’t want to jeopardise that.

Hazeen explained that they would be able to do all media learning, recording and other production within the classroom. The class teacher is very willing to learn how to teach the media skills, so eventually Hazeen would not need to be the one teaching. He also explained that the purpose of the “get your shoes dirty” principle is to persuade media people and service providers (eg clinics, religious groups) to leave their comfort zones to come and listen to people in community locations, like the women in the sewing class. The voices of local women making and taking new opportunities are the voices that media should amplify.

Hazeen also recognised that it could be a bit scary to talk on a radio programme, which could go out via a local FM station, about these new opportunities and the participants’ roles in creating them. It’s scary because it the people who traditionally make decisions and create income might feel threatened by the programme content. He encouraged the women that they could use pseudonyms whenever they create content, and that the name of their village needn’t be mentioned. This does create a challenge for one of our other norms – that of building trust and rapport with community members through familiar voices. However, listeners don’t need to identify the women speaking to be able to identify with them. The women have familiar accents and their stories or challenges are similar to what the listeners’ face.

Within minutes of Hazeen providing these reassurances, the participants asked him,

“will we able to talk about the womens’ issues that no-one ever talks about?”.

With an emphatic yes, Hazeen was delighted to say that this is one of the main reasons why we offer media training and ongoing support to create programmes. It’s what community-centred media should be all about.

Paraphrasing something I heard from Fred Bahnson, the frontlines of change are best led by those most disadvantaged by the status quo. In Rokhan-e-Kore contexts, we are equipping those disadvantaged by the status quo to take their first steps as agents of change by helping them to feel sufficiently safe to do so.

The arrival of some solar panels gave another indication that these culturally sensitive steps are bearing fruit. Hazeen and his local partner leave most of the engagement with class participants to a local woman so that there are only few occasions when a man is present and so the women can continue to observe “purdah” (or seclusion from men). Because the classes are in a public place outside their homes, and because a man may occasionally be present, the women do wear veils in the classroom. At this time of year, it gets very hot, and wearing a veil makes the heat even harder to bear. However, a local man has agreed to donate solar panels if Hazeen can provide pedestal fans. This reflects that some local men value the Bright Home activities and want to do something to support.

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Mirabai (not her real name) was admitted to hospital in the city on 19th September suffering with abdominal swelling and terrible pain in her body. Normally she wouldn’t go to hospital, but she had heard on the speakerbox in her village in India about symptoms of uterine cancer, which was prevalent among Adivasi communities, and that it was important to get treated as early as possible.  As an Adivasi woman, classified in India as a person from a “scheduled tribe“, the presenter on the speakerbox programme told her that her medical expenses would be covered under the MJPJAY programme.

When our colleagues from SEVA, who made the programme, went to visit her, shortly after her arrival, no beds were available and no doctor would treat her. Bewildered and in a strange city, far from friends and family, she was told that she first had to pay before she could receive treatment and be admitted into the hospital.  “But I have no money,” she told them, “I was told that treatment would be free.”

At the time of writing, 28 days after arriving in the city, Mirabai has been admitted to hospital only because the SEVA team advocated on her behalf and the only pain killers she has received has been from the SEVA team, who also paid for her to have a scan. Sadly it seems she does have cancer and it has already spread around her body, but still no treatment has been forthcoming.

“Please let me die at home.  It is better to have my family with me than to die as a stranger in a place I do not know.”

In a very frail and weakened state Mirabai told the team this morning, “Please let me die at home. It is better to have my family with me than to die as a stranger in a place I do not know.” While the SEVA team makes arrangements to help her get back to her village and ensure she has appropriate medication, the team leader frustratingly said: “This injustice seems to be common. By law she is entitled to healthcare under the Mahatma Jyotirao Phule Jan Arogya Yojana scheme, however the reality is that she did not have a voice to exercise her rights.”

Since the Adivasi Voices project began in 2018, a major thrust of the project has been to inform local communities of their rights under the law and the range of services that are available to them free of charge. They have had some success, such as when one village was able to access government support to get gas cookers to free them from the harmful effects of cooking over wood fires in their homes (See Sanghitha’s story).

“We realise that we’re just scratching the surface of this problem,” said team member Sam. “Awareness of your rights is not enough if you don’t have the power to exercise them,” he added.

It can often feel like there is nothing we can do in the face of injustice and inequality, however over the coming days, the SEVA team will be looking at how they can strengthen their advocacy role for Adivasi communities. They recognise there are three main ways they could help:

• Advocacy by the communities themselves:  Involving the communities in conversation and helping them see that when many people join together to call for change, powerful decision-makers can be influenced and difficult situations can change. This can be a very effective and sustainable way to do advocacy as it gives integrity and legitimacy to the activities and challenges of unjust power relations.
• Advocacy with the communities:  By bringing together communities affected by an unjust situation with other communities, groups and organisations who are not directly affected, collaborative action can effect change.
• Advocacy for the communities:  SEVA also recognises that it has a role to advocate on behalf of communities affected by an unjust situation, especially where they are unable to speak out because of fear or danger. They recognise this will involve strengthening relationships and trust with health service providers, informing them of the plight of tribal people and holding them to account when services are withheld or rights are ignored.

Mirabai’s story makes us want to scream against systems that perpetuate inequality, unfairness and injustice.  It has served as a reminder to our team at Amplifying Voices that we need to keep doing all we can, no matter how small, to work towards a time when all people, everywhere have an opportunity to live a life in peace and with dignity.  In the meantime our hearts go out to Mirabai and her family and community, and the many people like her who are victims of injustice.

The Adivasi Voices Project is a partnership initiative between the SEVA organisation and Amplifying Voices, using community-centred media approaches to bring positive change to resource-poor tribal communities that often feel neglected and marginalised.

Photo: An Adivasi listener group with speakerbox.

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Since June, Pakistan has been devastated by record monsoon rains causing the worst flooding in decades.  The provinces of Sindh and Balochistan have been worst hit, but communities where our partners work, in the northern province of Khyberpakhtunkhwa (KPK), have also been badly affected by the floods.

Amplifying Voices Pakistan has responded by supporting these communities near Charsadda and near Nowshera. Hazeen from Amplifying Voices Pakistan told me that private Youtubers and TikTokers did a good job of telling people where to find food and shelter. Amplifying Voices set out to reach people not reached through these channels, to raise the voices of people not reached by aid responders, and to provide access to health advice and basic medical treatment.

Nowshera

Zafar "gets his shoes dirty" getting out and about to hear community members' stories near Nowshera, Aug 2022.

Zafar, the founder of local partner, Community Media Power, is also Amplifying Voices Pakistan's representative in Nowshera for a new disaster response arm, AViD (Amplifying Voices in Disaster). As the flood warnings started, the local military commander invited Zafar to attend disaster management briefings. This turned out to be vital for accessing up-to-the-minute official information and advice on behalf of the listeners. Zafar also interviewed local government officials including the Additional Deputy Commissioner (see image at top of page) and the Deputy Commissioner. The interviews were recorded and aired on the local station, Zalmay Fm, and also filmed for sending out via Facebook videos. This helped people hear the official advice on evacuation and later, advice on returning to homes after the worst of the flood.

A key aim of the radio response is to help community members take an active role in their own response, so Zafar also visited places where people had taken refuge after fleeing their homes, or where they had missed out on relief, so they could share their stories on air. One place that Zafar visited had had 8ft of water in the houses and 10 days had gone by with no relief arriving. He interviewed community members and made short videos of their situation which he shared on social media platforms connected to local authorities. The next day authorities sent machinery to clean the streets and also provided clean drinking water, food and sprayed the area to prevent disease. One community member said:

"No one would dare to come to our place after seeing such dirt and mud but the AViD team came to us. We will never forget their courage and care for us"

AViD volunteers also provided food packages directly to another group that had missed out on emergency relief.

AViD volunteer distributing food packages, nr Nowshera, Aug 2022

Following the initial response, Zafar recorded a series of interviews amplifying the voices of local heroes, such as local firefighters, who had done so much to help their communities.

Radio broadcasts to celebrate the local heroes in the Pakistan flood response, Nowshera 2022

Charsadda

In Charsadda district, the compound where the Naway Saher studio is located was flooded. The team leader’s family who live there managed to save a lot of their belongings by moving them, as many families do, to a room on their rooftop before the floods hit. They also managed to save the studio equipment. They then had to evacuate. On returning to the house after the worst of the flood, they found they had a huge clean up job on their hands, but most of their belongings were safe.

The Naway Saher team leader, who is also a local health worker, created radio programmes alerting people to the health risks faced by people returning to flood-damaged homes. We asked him how the children had been affected by the floods. He told us that the children found it exciting, because it was like there was a swimming pool everywhere. But this was also a huge a health risk for the children.  Swimming or walking in flood water holds increased risk of snakebites. The water is very dirty and unhygienic, with lots of submerged hazards. Boreholes had been compromised so drinking water was polluted. Amplifying Voices Pakistan provided emergency funding so that Naway Saher was able to record discussions about these challenges with local people and air them on the local radio station, Dilbar FM.

Following the radio programmes Naway Saher and Amplifying Voices Pakistan provided a pop-up health camp with emergency supplies of basic medicines to help people who had become ill because of the flood waters. The Naway Saher team leader and his wife, the ladies health worker for the area, know the people in their community well and were able to prioritise medicines and advice going to those who needed it most.

Ladies health worker provides advice and medicine, nr Charsadda, 2022

Despite this, so many people came to get medicine that the supplies ran out within 2 days. The health worker had to move the dispensary from his usual clinic to a local school which had more space for people to queue up. Hazeen encouraged Naway Saher to issue an appeal to raise local support for the medicines. This would supplement the funding given by Amplifying Voices, and followed the principle of supporting local people to take a leading role in their own response.

Medical camp in the school

Officials expect the effects of the floods to continue into October and beyond. Teams from Nowshera and Charsadda will continue to provide special radio programmes on flood recovery, with a focus on health care. There will be at least one more health camp in each location to support the need for emergency medicines. An emergency response like this falls outside the budgets and plans for Amplifying Voices Pakistan, so we are grateful to our supporters who can give a little extra to support Hazeen and his team in this time. We are also grateful to FEBC Australia for their generous support of this response.

Amplifying Voices in Disaster (AViD)

This was the first deployment of an Amplifying Voices in Disaster (AViD) response. AViD, is a concept that Amplifying Voices UK and Amplifying Voices Pakistan been working on together in preparation for such an event. AViD builds on our previous experience supporting First Response Radio, using radio programmes and other media to provide timely 2-way communication channels for local communities affected by a disaster. AViD’s goal is for community voices to play a central role in humanitarian responses, so that communities recover quickly from disaster, growing in confidence, capacity, and resilience as they do so.

We feel that Amplifying Voices can be most effective in disaster response by working with existing community-centred media projects where trust already exists between our partners and community members. This provides a strong foundation for supporting the affected community by creating media programmes with community voices at the fore.

AViD also equips community groups to liaise with the influx of humanitarian service providers who come into disaster-affected communities often with quite specialised information and advice to communicate. To equip ourselves for the task and to build understanding with humanitarian service providers, we are members of the CDAC Network. The CDAC Network is a global alliance of media development organisations, UN agencies, the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, NGOs and specialist communications entities, all determined to enable and support dialogue with and between communities in preparation for, or response to disasters.

Donate to AViD Pakistan flood Response

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“My name is Hiram and I live in a small village in Maharashtra called Sagpada. Several months ago I was listening to a programme on the speakerbox provided by Seva Social Welfare Foundation, which challenged me to begin growing a kitchen garden to improve the nutrition of my family.  We rarely eat vegetables in our village because they are too expensive, but one day when the Seva team came to distribute the monthly audio programmes, they also gave us packets of vegetable seeds such as brinjal, bhindi (okra) and tomatoes. That evening, I listened to a programme about how eating vegetables would give us better health and I was inspired to start my own kitchen garden. The programmes gave instructions on how to look after the plants and even ideas for cooking with the vegetables that we grew. They said that by regularly adding vegetables into our diet, it would make us and our children healthy and strong.”

Hiram’s crops grew so well he soon had an abundant supply and was able to begin providing food for his family and his neighbours as well.

“Over the next few weeks I tended my new kitchen garden very carefully and watched with joy as my vegetables grew. The soil in our village is very fertile and with good rains, my plants were soon producing delicious vegetables. In fact they were so plentiful, that I had more than I needed for my family and was able to share with my neighbours.  Every evening we enjoyed the results of our garden and over the next few months  I even noticed that my children seemed healthier. I enjoyed tending my new crops so much that in the following months I began visiting neighbouring villages to share my experiences, encouraging them to grow their own gardens. I even began cultivating and giving away seeds from my own land.”

Hiram’s story so inspired Vaidhei, that she contacted Shilpa, Seva’s CEO  with an idea.  She realised that the power of community-centred media to influence people’s attitudes and behaviour was vital, and that if this was backed up with the provision of resources, the possibility for people to change was compelling.    Before long the two organisations were collaborating.  Pagaria launched a crowd-funding project to make seeds available at scale, to villages across the district.  Seva for its part ramped up programme production, promoting and inspiring the value of kitchen gardens in every home while the audience engagement team began distributing seeds with every programme – multiplying  the great work that Hiram had started, reaching many more Adivasi villages.

An Adivasi lady shows the packet of seeds that she’s just received from Seva’s audience engagement team.

Shilpa says, “When we started the Adivasi Voices Project in partnership with Amplifying Voices in 2018, our baseline study showed that malnourishment due to poor nutrition was a major problem across the tribal belt in Maharastra.  The beauty of Hiram’s story is that it shows the community  leading the way.  We believe this new initiative will mark a major change where we will begin to see healthier communities and a reduction in malnutrition and diseases especially among children,” she added.

Besides vegetable seeds Seva’s audience engagement team has now also begun distributing mango saplings, while they continue to make programmes with communities and other service providers to encourage and enable people to use their land more effectively and to develop sustainable livelihoods.

The post Sowing Seeds in India appeared first on Amplifying Voices.

This week, women from a minority community in Punjab started a series of workshops teaching sewing skills to other women and girls. At the end of the first day, participants and their relatives told the coordinator that they see this workshop as a launch pad to greater things.

Selfie-time at the first sewing class, Sargodha.

Setting up the Roshan Ghar workshop in Sargodha came out of listening to community members, hearing local concerns, and helping to identify the skills and resources that already exist in the community. Three women with skills and motivation offered to provide training to other women and young girls. The local partner found a suitable training room and a gift from an Australian media organisation, FEBC Australia, helped to buy sewing machines for the class.

Amplifying Voices encourage our partners to have these “strengths-based” conversations in any community they work with when starting a community-centred media project. This process of listening to what’s strong in a community can lead to inspiring on-air discussions about community members responding to challenges, and can encourage community members to put their skills to use in new off-air activities. With Roshan Ghar, it is the off-air activities, i.e. the vocational skills classes, that are paving the way for media conversations and inspiring people to reach for their dreams.

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Hazeen from Amplifying Voices Pakistan visited some villages near Nowshera with local contact, Zafar, who is leading the Community Media Power project. Following early community consultations, they heard that access to clean water is a priority for several of these villages. The male participants initially said that for change to come, there needed to be change at the top political levels, in particular the removal of corruption. After Hazeen encouraged the men to think more about issues that were closer to their circles of influence, they talked about the need for better hygiene and health, for water and electricity, about poverty. They said that access to clean water is a key issue that could greatly improve local health, especially among women and children.

At that time, Hazeen and Zafar had asked to hear from women in the community, but cultural norms meant that the women did not want to speak to unknown men publicly. More recently, a community leader who is very supportive of the project, introduced Hazeen and Zafar to a female social worker from the area. Before the media project came along, Gul had been going door to door, mobilising people to get vaccinated for polio. She also started a small project working with women to give vocational training. However, the project stopped when the roof fell in on the training room after heavy rains. The community knows her and trusts her, and she still wanted to work with these villages. So, she agreed to go with Zafar to the villages and do some interviews.

When Zafar first took Gul to help with interviews, they had prepared interviews about clean water and hygiene. And this is an issue that matters to women too, so they had plenty to say. Gul was a natural at interviewing so Hazeen encouraged Zafar to ask her to become more involved in developing the community-centred media project. She agreed and is really keen to help marginalised people by using radio. She also has the support of her family which is so important in this cultural context.

Gul joined Hazeen and Zafar for a training day with only women from the community, and they did another community mapping exercise. The outcome revealed the importance of listening to both groups directly, even though the men were trying to speak with the interests of women in mind. The number one issue that the women highlighted was education for women and girls, and related to this, when parents are arranging marriages, girls said they wanted their parents also to consider whether husband is educated.

Listening to different perspectives, nr Nowshera, 2022

The topic of women’s education did come up in the original consultation which only men had attended, but it was lower priority. One of the elders said “Pathan men are like men everywhere. They love their daughters very much and want the best for them – would do anything for them”. He went on to say that they also find it hard to give them access to education because schools or colleges are far away from the home, and they feel it is too risky to allow their daughters to travel across town to get there. There was a sense that those risks put this topic outside their perceived field of influence.

However, it was clearly a top priority for the women who met with Gul, and they decided this would be the topic for a pilot for series of women’s radio programmes. Zafar taught Gul to use the Zoom voice recorder so she could collect content without him being present and Hazeen taught her to write a script for a programme and prepare for interviews.

The pilot programme, called Bright Home, has interviews with community members (girls and parents of girls). It will also have an interview with a school principal about education for girls. The interviews cover issues such as access to schools as well as exploring the issue of transport and distance from the girls’ homes to the nearest schools. Gul will also be supported to develop her vocational skills programme in partnership with community members. The vocational programme will be called SHE (Skills, Health, Education).

A 2015 study among men in north-western Pakistan, found that the men’s attitudes to women’s participation in community and education are at times contradictory, but heavily influenced by the cutural norms of the Pakhtunwali tribal code.  The author recommends that “Understanding men’s views is a starting point. The next step is to engage men in the collective struggle for gender justice.” Community-centred media creates opportunities for men to engage by listening directly to the voices of women. Iterative listening can be a far-reaching process.

For more about Amplifying Voices’ listening approach to community engagement see Its a Ting thing

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Maharashtra’s Adivasis number more than 10 million and sadly, they often feel marginalised by mainstream society and regarded as outcastes, deprived of many of the basics of life such as healthcare, education, access to clean water and sanitation. Seva and Amplifying Voices have a shared desire to see communities freed from bondage and enjoying fullness of life.  The challenges these communities face however are complex, where poverty is not simply a lack of resources, but rather an oppressive web of social, political, economic and religious entanglements, which have been described as a ‘poverty trap’ by Robert ChambersNoted development practitioner Professor Robert Chambers describes the dimensions of poverty as an interactive system that he calls the ‘poverty trap’..  It’s a bit like filling a leaking bucket with water: no matter how much effort is put in, these communities are never able to succeed in achieving a decent level of health and wellbeing or making enough to meet their daily needs.

The beautiful Western Ghats in Maharastra is home to many Adivasi communities                 (Photo credit: Amy Hargreaves)

While the problem is complex, change is possible and over the last two weeks I’ve been hearing many testimonies of how Seva’s innovative community-centred media project has impacted people.  We came across the young woman in the picture during a visit to a remote Adivasi village, when we heard her remarkable story.  She told us about how she and her husband had been bonded labourers, which is a kind of modern-day slavery and is illegal in India but sadly still widely practiced.  However, one day they heard through Seva’s speakerbox programmes about ways in which they could escape that life and that Adivasi people were eligible for government grants to start businesses.  The programmes also spoke about how to do micro-enterprise and gave ideas for creating wealth, so she and her husband were inspired to start a shop in her village.  “This has set us free from bondage,” she told us, adding that she will never be a slave again, ending generations of bonded labour in her family.

During our two weeks in India there were many other stories that we heard, too many for a short blog-post, but I’ve been so impressed by the dedication of this small local team who have so much passion and are working tirelessly to see the lives of the Adivasi people transformed.  I am also convinced, that difficult and complex though it may be, change is possible.

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