Bright Home principles developed partly in response to lessons learned a few years ago in a different project where change started to happen too quickly. At that time, we had supported a youth group to make radio programmes about local social issues and injustices. At first, we were excited to hear how young people’s confidence and hope grew. Things could – and should – be different. However, some powerful people felt threatened and pressurised the project leader to stop. The fierce backlash forced the team to bring the project to an abrupt halt. They returned the equipment to us, and we were unable to continue any further activities in that community. Marginalised voices had become too loud, too fast.

A Bright Home approach

Hazeen Latif, CEO of Amplifying Voices Pakistan, told me that Bright Home projects take a different approach. Rather than starting with a media project, local partners provide sewing classes for young women and free medical camps focussing on women and children. These address some very pressing needs in a culturally acceptable way, developing traditional skills to earn income, and bringing healthcare to women and children who are rarely able to travel to a city for advice or treatment.

However, Bright Home classes are also places of conversation. Hazeen told me how, through conversation, aspirations are emerging and possibilities for change are growing. In one Punjabi community, conversations in the sewing classes about food shortages and lack of shade in summer led to a kitchen garden initiative and a tree planting campaign.

“Like my own daughter”

Some of these activities also improved community cohesion between minority Christian groups and people from the majority religion. The Bright Home team extended health camps and healthcare home visits beyond their own Christian community to work with women and children in majority religion homes. People from the majority religion responded, with one of their leaders donating money to buy medicines for the health camps. One older woman said of the Bright Home healthworker, “she is just like my own daughter”.

Home visits -supporting families across the community

The tree planting campaign gave men opportunity to get involved. Men from both communities came together to plant trees in public spaces and in each other’s home compounds. Both religions value good stewardship of creation, and in particular, they see tree planting as a virtuous activity.

Coming together to plant trees, Punjab, 2024

“No one will harm you”

The sense of togetherness became very real after an incident in the regional city, Sargodha. Someone there had used religion as an excuse to provoke a mob attack on a Christian business. But in the village, leaders from the majority community came to the Bright Home team and said, “No one will harm you when we are sitting here”.

Instead of feeling threatened by the changes brought by Bright Home, people with power, whether through gender or through religion, have felt included and found themselves contributors to change.

“I am Light”

In KPK province, some of the young women attending a Bright Home class spoke up and said they wanted to learn to read, write and do arithmetic. In that community, many girls had not been allowed to go to school. However, the literacy and numeracy classes that are now underway are not perceived as a threat, because these skills are necessary for using sewing patterns, and for developing businesses to make money from the sewing skills. The girls called the literacy classes, “Zama Rana” (I am light).

Working with sewing patterns, Nowshera

In each of the Bright Home groups, they use speakerboxes for listening to health advice programmes made in other Amplifying Voices projects. And in each place, some of the young women would ask to learn how to make speakerbox programmes themselves – “If they can do it, we can do it” – They start by discussing topics that are raised in the class setting. The programmes are played within the class to start with, but as confidence, skills, and local acceptance of the Bright Home activities have grown, some groups are now airing their programmes on local FM stations.

Some people may still oppose changes, especially those that offer opportunity and influence to young women in very conservative communities. However, there are now more who support the changes, who even help to make change happen. Bright Home communities are able to amplify local voices, because they do so with care.

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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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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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