Mahiti Manthana, a project of IT for Change, is a multi-pronged ICT strategy using radio, video and telecentres towards a contextual and convergent, technology-mediated, social change process. The project is embedded within Mahila Samakhya Karnataka (MSK), a development intervention of the Government of India that seeks to empower disadvantaged rural women.

The objectives of Mahiti Manthana are to serve the organisational goals of MSK in a two-fold manner through techno-social innovations: by enhancing the effectiveness of MSK systems and processes for building and strengthening grassroots women’s collectives, or sanghas; as well as by directly impacting grassroots women’s empowerment at the local level.

The project components include: Kelu Sakhi ('Listen, My Friend'), a weekly radio programme catering to sangha women in different villages across Mysore district, over a geographic area of 6,268 square kilometres; inexpensive videos produced locally and iteratively on a wide range of development and gender issues; and Namma Mahiti Kendras ('Our Information Centres'), oriented to strengthening community information processes and building linkages with external institutions.

The project thus builds upon a development intervention promoting ‘open learning communities',1 bringing in new technologies to democratise the learning context through processes rooted in critical pedagogy. The aim is to enable MSK to develop capacities to devolve organisational ‘expertise’ so that women in the sangha can independently “reflect on their own conditions and the situation of others; their social connection with other people and their environment; and their participation in various aspects of society”,2 and act in ways that empower them and lead to real autonomy. Mahiti Manthana believes that the opportunities presented by new technologies to achieve such 'open learning communities', participating within and across their geographical-cultural contexts, has opened up a whole new horizon for large, grassroots social change organisations like MSK.

The broader vision of the project is to develop, demonstrate and sustain processes by which technology mediates positive social change. The mainstream use of technology tends to be profit-driven, non-participatory and often gender insensitive, marginalising the excluded from their fundamental right to information and to communicate. In contrast, Mahiti Manthana believes in the potential of technology to democratise power and resources in the development context. The project works from the premise that a social approach to technology that is inclusive, gender-sensitive and participatory facilitates collective ownership of such technology and in turn triggers multiple empowering processes.

With this broad vision in mind, Mahiti Manthana seeks to strengthen the MSK development initiative in Mysore district in Karnataka, India, giving MSK a new lease of life in reaching its goals of “empowerment through education”.3 It endeavours to promote contextual, life-long learning through sangha-shaales (sangha schools) – the point where multiple technological platforms cohere to bolster women’s effort for change at the local level.

Specifically, the objectives of Mahiti Manthana are to:

1. Meet the information and communication needs of the partner organisation: MSK is a programme that works with poor, rural, non-literate women from disadvantaged castes by providing their sanghas with vital information on health, legal issues, Panchayat – or local – government, education and self-reliance, apart from initiating thrift and credit activities.4 Rather than create an entirely new structure, Mahiti Manthana aims to use ICTs to support, strengthen and transform the existing activities and processes of the grassroots intervention.5

2. Strengthen sanghas by meeting their information and knowledge needs and redefining their social status: In a context where almost two-thirds of sangha women are landless agricultural labourers, more than half are from disadvantaged caste groups, three-fourths have never attended formal school, one-third lack access to electricity, and four-fifths to private water supply, Mahiti Manthana strives to create processes that enable women to access vital and relevant information on key gender and development issues. The project establishes a new ICT-based knowledge ecology that allows sangha women to debate, affirm, validate and challenge, and thus develop knowledge and perspectives on critical issues within a non-hierarchical and democratic setting. This information and knowledge ecology scaffolds informed and autonomous action through which dalit women challenge traditional power structures and redefine their status within local communities.

3. Build the collective identity of the sangha women: The project seeks to build the collective strength of geographically dispersed sanghas, spread over 150 villages across the district, by providing them a platform to share, articulate, question, learn and act collectively to validate their life experiences and claim their citizenship rights.

4. Create linkages with institutions and networks: Where linkages to institutions, such as government departments, district offices, banks and legal institutions are typically weak, and the resultant lack of access to information, services and schemes provided by these institutions disadvantages poor women, Mahiti Manthana attempts to use technology as a conduit to strengthen women's access to these institutions so that they can secure their rightful entitlements.

The project uses radio, video and telecentres – based on the inherent functionalities and potentialities of each of these technologies – to fulfill project objectives. Some of the milestones achieved thus far are included below.

Radio:

* Negotiating for and securing a weekly half hour broadcast slot – the Kelu Sakhi programme – on the Karnataka State Open University’s Gyanvani FM radio channel, free of cost. This unique collaboration between two organisations – MSK, under the Department of Education, Government of India and Gyanvani, under various government and non-government departments and institutions and facilitated by Indira Gandhi National Open University, Ministry of Human Resource Development – has facilitated the broadcast of the radio programme of, and for, sangha women. The broadcast covers Mysore district, enabling geographically dispersed sanghas to tune in on a weekly basis.

* Launch and weekly broadcast of the radio programme, Kelu Sakhi, on Mondays at 9pm, with repeat broadcast on Tuesday at 9am for the past one year. Kelu Sakhi has completed 54 weeks of broadcast as of December 31, 2007.

* Successfully introducing and promoting collective listening as a pedagogic exercise to promote critical reflection of the content of the weekly broadcast. Women listen collectively and stay on after 9.30 pm, often until late, deliberating upon issues and moving from particular to general in their learning. Kelu Sakhi has created new positive loops from reflection to action in their lives.

* Holding two capacity building workshops with the goal of familiarising sangha women with recording, organising and performing for radio. The second workshop specifically emphasised the significance of collective listening.

* Training local, young girls in the project team6 on radio production and evolving a systematic production cycle to meet weekly broadcast time lines, in collaboration with MSK and the sangha women.

The project is currently engaged in a handover of all aspects of radio programme production to MSK.

Video:

* Defining the nature and scope of videos through a journey to create participatory, informational and sangha-women centred videos, and evolving a production process for low-cost, contextual, iterative videos made in relatively short cycles, amenable for dynamic adaptations (facilitated by new creative possibilities in editing) based on emerging learning possibilities determined by learners.

* Producing 12 videos over a one year period, with the participation of MSK, on various subjects relevant to sangha women’s learning and agenda for action.

* Strengthening MSK's understanding, participation and ownership over the video process, which involves a conscious and ongoing effort to demystify video technology as a vehicle of communication that allows development practitioners to transform their experiences in the field into a powerful form of expression. This in turn has made possible the direction of two videos by one staff member of MSK, who stepped up to build new skills in video-making to support her work as a ‘teacher-facilitator’, as well as the involvement of two other staff members in the production of their first videos.

* Securing sangha women's positive response to the videos – getting them hooked on the learning process involving video – and their continued interest in video content (in defining scope, vantage, subject), as well as in video viewing (through critiquing content, selecting specific films in sync with sangha priorities and requesting screenings, and suggesting creation of ‘new’ versions/adaptations of existing video).

* Mahiti Manthana is in the process of training young women in the project team to develop competencies in overall aspects of video production, including ideation, direction, sound, camera and editing. The project wants to establish regular cycles of video production, and this will be the next milestone.

Telecentre:

* Setting up of Namma Mahiti Kendras in 4 villages, each of which serves as a node for five to six surrounding villages, through an intensive participatory process that has ensured that the centres are collectively owned and managed by sangha women in the village. At each village, women have bargained and negotiated with local power elites to obtain the physical space, the electricity connection and where possible, Internet connectivity.

* Finding, recruiting and training one young woman (known as sakhis) from each village community for all the telecentre villages. The project consciously focuses on creating leadership opportunities for these young girls, who then become the vital link between the sangha, the larger village community and the relevant government departments and external agencies.

* Building the confidence of sakhis to negotiate with government departments to secure information on schemes and services for dissemination in the village.

* Establishing 2 sub-district level telecentres after such a demand was expressed by MSK and sangha women. These centres act as the hubs for networking the telecentres located in their respective sub-district areas.

* The project shortly expects to set up more village-level telecentres and commence and sustain tele-health and tele-legal services through video conferencing with experts located in urban areas.

Milestones in the overall project strategy:

* Conceiving the sangha-shaale (sangha school) as an institutional innovation in the MSK context. MSK aspires to be a learning organisation and situates the sangha at the centre of its transformative strategy towards gender equality. The goal of women’s empowerment is sought to be achieved through the sangha, which is a space where knowledge and action coalesce. The sangha-shaale catapults the sangha conceived originally as a “community of practice” into the next level, offering a new institutional framework through techno-social innovations that scaffolds the knowledge-action-empowerment cycle.

The sangha-shaale is a space that bypasses limitations imposed by women's lack of literacy to exponentially extend the process of collective reflection and action, by drawing on the strengths of a new techno-social architecture. It emphasises collective listening to, discussion of and feedback on radio broadcasts; collective viewing of, discussion of and knowledge generation on, video-based content; a new information architecture through the telecentre, controlled by poor, dalit women that democratises power in the local context; and it offers a new mechanism for strategising, mobilisation and empowerment.

* Setting up of the sangha-shaale in 2 villages and initiating the cycle of collective listening and video viewing at these centres.

* The goal of Mahiti Manthana is to establish 10 more sangha-shaales in the next 3 months. While the pilots in the initial villages required considerable trial and error, the project is poised at a point of process maturity that will enable rapid diffusion of the concepts.

1 This concept has been used in UNESCO’s programme – “Learning Without Frontiers: Constructing Open Learning communities for Lifelong Learning”; accessed from http://www.unesco.org/education/lwf/ on January 4, 2008.

2 Op cit, UNESCO, http://www.unesco.org/education/lwf/.

3 “Mahila Samakhya Programme: The Genesis”; accessed from http://www.education.nic.in/ms/ms.asp on January 7, 2008.

4 Refer to Annexure 1.1 for MSK architecture.

5 Refer to Annexure 1.2 for Mahiti Manthana architecture within MSK structure.

6 The Mahiti Manthana team has four local, young women who assist the core team involved in strategic level planning and implementation. Training these young women in technical skills has paved the way for acceptance by MSK of the possibilities of building capacities within their own structure.

The present paradigm of affordable technology allows for easy storage, processing and sharing of data, information and knowledge. This sets the context for meeting the objectives of strengthening the information and communication processes of MSK, the partner organisation, by addressing their constraints in providing accurate and relevant information to a geographically dispersed, non-literate group of women, setting up robust and situated learning systems for peer-to-peer learning and collective action, while also dealing with their human resource and other organisational limitations. The inherent strengths of each of the technologies – radio, video, computing and connectivity – are harnessed to specifically support and enhance the processes and systems that strengthen MSK's goal of women’s empowerment by constructing a new institutional knowledge and action framework.

Both video and radio are accessible and viable options for non-literate women, compared to the print medium, which has marginalised them so far from seeking and contributing knowledge.

Community radio licenses in India allow broadcasts over a range of 6-10 kilometres, roughly covering about five to eight villages, whereas the community of women’s collectives in Mahiti Manthana are spread over 150 villages of the district. The partnership with Karnataka State Open University radio station overcomes this challenge, as its frequency covers the entire district. Thus, the radio programme retains the essence and character of community radio, catering particularly to the sangha women, with the advantage of the access and reach of a mass media system.

Not only does the radio coverage successfully reach all women’s sanghas in the district, but it also reaches out subtly to non-sangha women and young boys and girls and men in these villages, co-opting them in into an emerging, progressive gender discourse. Men who previously had little understanding of the nature of work of the women’s sanghas now have a window to understand and interpret a transformative women’s space. Women who are not part of the MSK sanghas now have the opportunity to gain information and knowledge through the radio broadcasts.

Further, since the radio programme is broadcast every week without fail, it becomes a regular and reliable contact point and frame of reference for sangha women to access both information and experts/resource persons. The medium allows for material to reach the community in a current and timely manner. Slots for both sangha women and resource persons of MSK with whom they are acquainted, as well as the nature of the content of the radio programme, serve to strengthen the collective identity of the women. Feedback, via phone calls and through discussions with resource persons at physical meetings, make the programme a dynamic and responsive organisational learning exercise.

The very fact that the digital technology is ‘portable’ allows for its easy adoption in a local context, impacting the kinds of content produced. Free from the limitations imposed by studio recordings, live sounds can now be captured, and local knowledge, dialects and subaltern discourses can be given recognition – something rarely engaged in by the mainstream media. The radio programme's usage of a language that is their own makes it very accessible to sangha women. And so, while the mainstream media affords no space to non-literate, disadvantaged women, Mahiti Manthana validates their experience, knowledge and perspectives, providing them with a mass media forum that legitimises their struggles, their courage and their enormous efforts for development within their communities.

The power of the visual medium lies in its ability to capture an audience with its close-to-life projection of stories and messages. The allure of the audio-visual medium ensures effective communication and higher retention of information and messages. When presented on video, messages that have been communicated repeatedly through older methods, primarily lectures and instruction, have effectively reached out to women in a fraction of time and with much greater impact. This is key in an organisation with a very small human resource base that has to deliver information to a large number of women, as the knowledge transfer chain often dilutes the quality of the information flowing to the final point. Videos, on the other hand, carry 'undiluted' information, and it is this potential that has been harnessed in Mahiti Manthana. Further, videos affirm adult-learning pedagogies, promoting democratic dialogue around knowledge. Videos capture ‘expert’ inputs that were available at a one-time premium and take them to many more places where experts may not visit. This reach has been enabled by the low cost of distribution channels of digital video technologies, their portability, and the emergence of the Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS) that allows for multiple copies to be created and shared. A DVD currently costs less than Indian Rupees 20, or US Dollar 0.50! And a one time effort to create content that is used by sangha women can be distributed to them for insignificant costs. Women have access to television sets and to DVD players that they rent for a very nominal cost to view Mahiti Manthana DVDs.

In the context of illiteracy, video opens windows to global knowledge. Digital technology also easily allows multiple viewings, and furthermore, at the user’s discretion and choice. The fact that development- and gender-oriented videos are locally available democratises learning, allowing women to use them in various ways – to negotiate with their community, to build the capacity of their peers, and towards collective learning and discussion. Women of some collectives have requested community screenings to share the work that they are doing. Such screenings have been potent in their power to trigger public debate and community ownership of gender issues. Videos that are relevant and close to the lives of women invariably provoke lively discussions that make the collective learning process very rich, intimate and intense. Videos also allow for individual interpretation of messages, providing many perspectives for discussions. While mainstream media has practically no content relevant to the lives of rural communities, digital video technologies make it possible for development agencies with some training and experience to take up content creation for, and with, the communities they work with.

The tradition of the literate, male, power elites acting as gatekeepers of information and dominating its dissemination is altered by Namma Mahiti Kendras. The mainstream approach to telecentres is positioned either from a business and profit-making enterprise point of view, or from that of a training and job creation institute. These are no doubt useful, yet it is necessary to take into account the social infrastructure nature of telecentres, which sees them as a space to strengthen community information processes and build new institutional linkages. This, when topped with an emphasis on sangha women's ownership and management of overall key decision-making aspects, creates the conditions for greatest positive impact on the women's status and identity within the community.

Up-to-date village-level and household-level databases are maintained at the telecentres. The data can easily be tallied with the official records of the government departments, aiding in the monitoring and assessment of schemes and services. Frequent gathering of information on schemes, services and knowledge inputs by the sakhi during her visits to government offices ensures that the village community accesses current and relevant information relating to their lives and development. The interactions of the sakhi with government officials on the one hand and the wide village constituency on the other also bring her a new status and role in the community.

Health-related data maintained at the centres are a necessary prerequisite for launching video conferencing services with practitioners, particularly women's health experts. The project is also currently negotiating with lawyers to introduce tele-legal services. The Internet not only enables communication between MSK staff and sangha women, a very vital link, but also between the village community and the wider development community.

The convergence of the three technology platforms to create a greater whole is envisioned in the sangha-shaale, which sees the telecentre transformed from being a mere technology 'hub' to a space for sangha women's collective learning and action. The quick leads and small information capsules provided by radio are enhanced both by more in-depth and informational videos as well as the institutional linkages supported by the telecentre. Information about new video productions is announced over radio, and requests for screening and recording are encouraged on the broadcast, as is the sharing of discussions and learnings from video content already viewed by the sangha women. The dynamic and iterative nature of knowledge processes is not only rich but affirms a democratic spirit, where every woman from the sangha can feel a claim over the technology platforms. The project is already beginning to explore the option of recording audio content at the telecentre using the available computer facilities and then uploading the audio file from the telecentre using the Internet, so that it is accessible at the district-level, and the recorded audio content can become part of the next radio programme broadcast.

The emergence of the FOSS movement has added advantages to the social sector, and Mahiti Manthana also contributes to, and advocates for, its growth by making all knowledge artefacts of the project available under the Creative Commons License.

ICTs have thus strengthened the MSK strategy, making it easier to accomplish the organisational dream of building local “communities of practice” that can act autonomously. The technology and social process amalgamation recreates the MSK institutional framework, directly contributing to the organisational vision of “education for empowerment”.

Mahiti Manthana is a pilot project that designs ICT processes and systems to strengthen existing development initiatives of grassroots organisations, and consciously works with ideas, methods and practices that can be owned and sustained by such organisations. The project can be adapted and replicated by any development organisation- be it another non-governmental organisation or community-based organisation, a small private group or a government department. However, the following criteria must be met by any organisation that takes up the project:

* The organisation must have a social agenda

* The organisation must firmly believe in and adopt a participatory approach to both development and technology

The project has helped Mahila Samakhya Karnataka achieve its goals and objectives and has gained insights into the strengths of each of the three technologies adopted, and also of the convergence of these. The learnings from the project will thus enable other organisations to determine the individual or the combination of these technologies that best meet their objectives. In fact, with a view to enabling such transfer, IT for Change is setting up the Centre for Community Informatics and Development, described in detail in Section 3 on Sustainability.

Mahiti Manthana, as a multi-pronged technology strategy, uses three main ICT platforms:

Radio serves as an organisational communication platform that strengthens MSK’s activities and priorities while providing a space and voice for disadvantaged, rural women. The weekly broadcast is structured as a hybrid between community and campus radio formats, and allows women to use the media for telling their own stories, asserting their perspectives and for peer-to-peer communication. The programme provides both a pedagogic tool as well as a space for organisation building.

Specifically, the radio programme plugs into general MSK activity in the region, giving information about or discussing various activities conducted or going on during the week as well as future activity schedules. The content is generated in a participatory manner and in the local dialect. Apart from informational aspects and discussion of various gender-related issues, the programme helps sangha women articulate their collective identities as belonging to a larger women’s group or movement, while legitimising gender debates.

The process of creating a socially influential space for women’s collectives has generated in-depth insights into the usefulness of radio as a tool for women’s empowerment. This form of radio is accessible as a technology and is readily embraced by sangha women as a tool for sharing and learning.

The video component is squarely placed within the MSK strategy. The project uses inexpensive, locally-made videos which carry relevant and contextual knowledge for women’s collectives. The video content generation is an ongoing effort in which the team is in the process of evolving a comprehensive strategy that will enable MSK and the sangha women to benefit from the visual content, as well as from using the visual medium itself to aid the process of empowerment.

The video component of Mahiti Manthana spent considerable time dislodging the accepted meanings of video in development communication. Rather than exclusively adopting the documentary or community video formats, Mahiti Manthana videos feature sangha women themselves: some are simple recordings of sub-district or district level training sessions that only a few women could attend, but many can view on video; some capture processes in one sangha which can be replicated in others; while some other videos simply show women discussing key issues in the village, or interacting with government officials. Making and distributing these videos can be cheaper than developing and distributing text-based material, and the focus is on realising the empowering possibilities of the visual medium.

Mahiti Manthana introduced the concept of sangha-shaale to emphasise the point of a new, independent and viable institutional form of learning for adult women, who may be largely non-literate, but have a great thirst for knowledge, in addition to an orientation to social and community issues. Sangha-shaales are a convergent techno-social architecture with the flexibility for women to conduct learning sessions independently without necessary reliance on the presence of MSK staff members; and contain possibilities of alternative learning through dynamic and iterative processes.

Telecentres are owned and managed by sangha women, who select a young woman, or sakhi, to handle daily operations. In addition to providing computer education and fee-based services, Mahiti Manthana focuses on the real empowerment possibilities of telecentres, which lie in the linkages with public institutions to obtain due entitlements. Telecentres are used for providing basic information about government services and schemes; for facilitating collection of community data; for helping public service providers to use this data to better target interventions (like health interventions for pregnant women and infants); and for extracting accountability for services not provided, by matching data of actual health interventions with those listed in public records obtained through use of governmental Right To Information directives.

Even with no knowledge about computers, sangha women are eager to own the telecentre in their village. They sense the importance of such a powerful institution in the village, and the empowerment that its ownership can bring. Mahiti Manthana uses sangha women’s ownership of the village telecentre as an empowerment strategy in itself, as it places non-literate and marginalised women at the centre of an important node of information and communication processes both in the village and with external institutions, such as government departments, banks or other NGOs. Thus, telecentres create a new culture of information that is empowering to sangha women.