Author: Susan Thomas

 

Communication is a process that weaves through the socio-cultural fabric of the society. It is not captive to any form of media, rather it develops on its own in different sections of society within their own unique networks. There are however different approaches to communication available for dissemination of information today that allow individuals to make informed decisions – this is the indispensable purpose of development communication.

 

The United Nations understands Development Communication as a social process based on dialogue using a broad range of tools and methods… seeking change at different levels and includes listening, building trust, sharing knowledge and skills, building policies, debating and learning for sustained and meaningful change.

 

Participatory is a keyword

Digital Green facilitates behaviour change through a unique approach– involving participatory video production and dissemination and can be classified under development communication and keeps community participation at its core.

 

Having been part of the Digital Green team since it began its work in Bihar in 2012, I have been witness to the changes on the ground. Our pilot project (in just two blocks of Muzaffarpur, Bihar) was initially focused on producing and screening videos showing cost-effective agricultural best practices.

 

Our approach evolved and we started working in other domains such as health and nutrition, institution building and financial inclusion. and today we are operational in 18 districts and ready to expand into new regions. At present, there are over 2.4 lakh people in Bihar who have watched a video at least once and more than 1.5 lakh community members have adopted at least one practice seen in these videos.

 

 

 

The video screening is mediated by an individual from within their community who attempts to initiate dialogue and discussion. The audio-visual media assists in easy communication and comprehension among rural non-literate or semi-literate women and men, since it is in their own local language with actors who hail from similar cultural backgrounds as themselves. The discussions also help the community members seek clarifications regarding the efficacy of the best practices shown in the video and make an informed decision to adopt it.

 

Skill-building

Digital Green also facilitates training programs for extension workers and community members who produce and disseminate these videos, directed towards building and enhancing their skills on equipment handling, documentation and interpersonal communication so that they can facilitate video dissemination where community members can participate and share their feedback and experiences. The documentation process also helps in capturing the feedback and queries and assistance required to resolve issues for which there is no ready-made solutions available locally.

 

Here the community workers (or mediator) plays a crucial role as a communication channel between the communities watching the video and Digital Green and partner organization. This way, Digital Green’s approach keeps the audience at the heart of it.

 

Digital Green methodology also has a mechanism built into it to verify the reception of the messages. This is done by mediators when they pause the videos at certain important points to reiterate non-negotiable points in the video. This allows them to ask certain standard open-ended questions ensuring the viewer’s comprehension. It also helps mediators to repeat and reinforce the important information among viewers.

 

 

 

The ripple effect

I have seen many farmers become role models among their community and improving their own and their community member’s knowledge of agricultural as well as better health and nutrition practices. One such person is Ajit Kumar, a mediator in Rajika Rampur Village, Morwa Block, Samastipur District, Bihar who has been using our video-based model since October 2014.

 

Ajit Kumar was recently adjudged a category (top-level) mediator by Digital Green since he had been able to demonstrate a very high adoption rate among his audiences in the last quarter of 2014 through 14 videos that he screened. Ajit has since then worked with over 141 farmers, helping them adopt Systematic Wheat Intensification (SWI) method and best practices related to some locally grown vegetables.

 

 

He has also been encouraging community members to adopt organic and low budget farming techniques by showing Digital Green’s videos on those subjects. Ajit has himself adopted these practices in his own field to grow seven different vegetables in a land measuring 2 Katthas  ( a 1/11th portion of an acre) by using organic fertilizer and multi-cropping methods that he learnt through the Digital Green videos.

 

Leveraging mobile technologies

As we scale up our projects in Bihar as well as other geographical locations,  we are also trying to leverage technology in developing other such tools. In Bihar, we conducted a pilot earlier this year, to appraise interactive voice response system (IVRS) as a supportive tool for information exchange. The pilot was conducted in Samastipur district of Bihar and provided a zero cost platform to extension workers to share their experiences and voice their concerns. It also helped our staff to address the issues within a shorter period of time.

 

IVRS also reduced the communication gap as it was possible to reach all extension workers at once by broadcasting a single message. The IVRS also proved successful in bridging over the problem of women members being unable to voice their concerns at review meetings in the presence of male members. The IVRS became their voice since they could record their responses on the IVRS from their personal space.

 

Conclusion

In recent times, various forms of communication have emerged as a significant tool of behavior change which has stimulated development across the world. Various media such as community radios, road shows, folk media, street theatres, documentaries and of course participatory videos have been paving the way for the poor to make informed decisions and adopt better practices in the field of agriculture, healthcare, education and other livelihood options.

 

Since its very inception, Digital Green ensured active participation of the rural community. Voices of the rural population have been heard. For sure, Digital Green’s method has been an innovative and exciting one for bringing about behaviour change among the rural poor in India and sub-Saharan Africa.

 

What do you get when you put 14 of your best trainers, old and new, together in a room? A lot of energy and a truckload of ideas on making the training more fun and participatory!

That’s what we got when we got together for a Training of Trainers in Hyderabad earlier this month.

 

 

 

At Digital Green, we have been striving very hard to make the trainings that we give to our partner organizations and grassroots workers even more effective. For this purpose, 14 trainers from across our state teams in India came together to improve their participatory facilitation skills and methods. Some of those trainers have experience of several years, while others were fairly new to the world of training. However, the training program ensured that it challenged each one of them and encouraged their creative selves to emerge.

 

 

 

 

The training focused primarily on refining our conceptual understanding of participation deconstructing power relations within training groups, especially in the context that we work in. We are often so involved in our day-to-day work that we forget the bigger picture the larger change in the world that we are aiming to bring. These discussions helped us place our work and ourselves in the overall development work.

 

 

 

 

This was followed by focusing on the core skills that a good facilitator should have. We also did a little bit of soul-baring as trainers. We reflected and thought about instances where we haven’t been able to do our best. Some talked about getting impatient with participants, others talked about showing bias towards a particular participant, or reaching the training unprepared. It helped us realize that all of us make mistakes and that there is always scope to improve, and that it is important to inculcate self-awareness than remaining complacent about one’s ability as a good trainer.

 

The next day challenged the trainers even more – when they did a Participatory Rural Appraisal in a village that none of them had worked in before. Facilitating a group in an uncontrolled environment, where several power dynamics became very obvious, including caste and gender, proved to be a really helpful exercise.

 

 

 

 

Learning from this field experience also helped trainers to challenge themselves even further. Each participant designed an existing training session in a creative manner and demonstrated to the rest of the group.

 

Several of the sessions gave a completely new direction to how we approach training and learning of our participants. Most of the trainers left inspired to make our trainings more participatory, more engaging and more inspiring for the people they work with. We might never become the perfect trainer that we want to become, but we can surely become super-trainers!

 

As we celebrate three years of some very challenging and fulfilling work in Bihar, we thought it was time to start exploring ways to strengthen our partnership with our partner, Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society (BRLPS) locally known as JEEViKA by increasing the involvement of JEEViKA’s staff in implementation of our model of behavioral change communication.

 

For this purpose on the 13^th of July 2015, we organized an orientation programme for the District Communication Managers of 26 districts that we work in, on our approach, current status of project and goals ahead. This was in line with the project goals envisaged by Digital Green and JEEViKA, which seeks to ensure greater involvement of JEEViKA staff and to have an in-house team to improve the quality of videos, make them more interesting and attract more viewers, creating better possibilities for adoptions.

 

 

At present, Livelihood Managers of JEEViKA support DG’s intervention as anchors for their respective districts. They play a crucial role – approving the storyboards and videos after looking into content and processes since most of the videos in Bihar have been about agricultural practices. However, Livelihood Managers have limited knowledge about the quality of videos.

 

We started the day-long orientation by explaining the DG approach and the evolution of our partnership with JEEViKA in Bihar. We then shared the current status of videos produced, dissemination among community members and adoptions along with the goals to be achieved by end of 2015.

 

The Communication Managers of JEEViKA also shared their current roles and responsibilities with our team, which followed an interesting dialogue about the possibilities they saw of contributing towards the DG and JEEViKA partnership model.

 

During the course of the orientation, we screened four videos on different aspects such as Digital Green’s story and approach, equipment handling (Pico Seekho) and agricultural practices during the meeting. The participants appreciated the videos and were very surprised to learn that the videos on agricultural practices were shot by a video production team comprising of Village Resource Persons (members of the community trained by DG as additional resources for an agricultural extension using our model). Most of the participants had earlier had the impression that the DG team shoots all the videos. This meeting provided us with an opportunity to dispel myths like this and reinforce the principle of community participation which is central to our model.

 

Towards the close of day, the participants were quite involved in the discussions and shared their observations and feedback to improve the videos. The communication team of JEEViKA assured their support to DG’s community-led video production process on various aspects such as quality improvement during storyboard preparation, selecting a better sequence of shots, angles and frames. They have also suggested possibilities to include voice over and annotation and text slides and selection of good actors to dramatize and make the videos more interesting. The participants also expressed their eagerness to visit the field to observe live dissemination so that they can help mediators improve their communication and facilitation skills. By the end of the orientation programme, JEEViKA’s communication staff were also keen to record and showcase the progress made by the use of the DG approach in their work.

 

Observing the interest and enthusiasm among the participants we may assume safely that the coming years are going to see a new facet of our partnership that will give a huge boost to community participation and engagement within our projects in Bihar.

Contributed by Tanmay Goel, Assistant Software Engineer, Digital Green

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Village resource persons (VRPs) are the key actors in Digital Green’s video-enabled learning approach that focuses on providing farmers the right information at the right time. At Digital Green, we constantly strive to provide these frontline workers effective, timely and supportive supervision.

A big opportunity that we could recently tap in to involved the reach of mobile phones in rural India. We observed that most VRPs had at least one mobile phone in the family, if not a personal one. Also, given the geographical expanse that each of our Program Managers have to increasingly manage, we felt that an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system could be used to pass messages between the Program Managers of Digital Green and VRPs. The advantage of the system was that extension workers could receive important messages directly from the Managers, like schedule of block meetings etc., rather than through the organisational hierarchy. The system also made it possible for VRPs to share crucial information or any issues back with the Managers at no extra cost.

We collaborated with Awaaz.De to conduct a pilot in Samastipur and Nalanda districts of Bihar from November 2014 – February 2015 and 69 VRPs were registered on the system. Messages about upcoming meetings and currently-relevant seasonal videos were broadcasted to all VRPs in a block. We also ran a contest to encourage listeners to interact more with the system.

A few statistics from the pilot:

• 58 VRPs listened to at least one of the messages.
• On 89% of calls, listeners heard the entire message.
• A total of 87 messages were recorded on the system by VRPs and responded to by our Program Managers.
• 50 of these were valid.
• 26 out of 58 listeners attempted to leave a message.
• 34% listeners left at least one message that was not blank and contained a message other than hello.

One of the most fascinating outcomes of the pilot was the sheer number and variety of messages left by VRPs on the system. When VRPs became familiar with the system, they started using it to get their messages across to the program managers. Their messages included requests for relevant videos, invitations to shoot good adoptions and reports on adoption and screening progress in their villages. Some messages were really amusing; One VRP said, I want to see Satyamev Jayate episode on pico projector and another said, Happy new year to all! In this new year, when will have our first meeting. In fact, managers felt that a wider variety of issues were voiced via IVRS than in other public fora where CRPs were reluctant to stand out.

We observed that the IVR system was not very easy for VRPs to use. Some IVR prompts referred to Beep sound and Hash key that VRPs encountered for the very first time, and due to this recording messages was difficult and unintuitive. Yet, we were surprised by VRPs effort to learn the systems usage and, with a little bit of training, they used it avidly and actively.

Ultimately, the project was a great learning experience. We enjoyed listening to VRPs voices sitting in our office, and our Program Managers felt that IVR system reduced delay in resolution of issues and facilitated communication (group and one-on-one). In future, we will be designing structure research projects to measure the impact of such a system.