Leveraging technology to give common man a voice

Thursday, 11 March 2004, 20:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: Every day, fishermen of a small village in Pondicherry wait to hear the weather bulletin relayed through loudspeakers before taking to the sea. It is a group of village women trained by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation who scan US Navy weather forecasts on the Internet and relay the life saving bulletins. This is but one example of information and communication technology that OneWorld International, a global network, is trying to create through its 1,600 NGO partners globally to help poor and depressed people find a voice and grab a space in sustainable development. The Swaminathan Foundation is one such NGO. "Our aim is to promote use of technology by creating appropriate open knowledge network," said Anuradha Vittachi, a British national and the London-based director of OneWorld International Foundation. In Kenya, home to more mobile telephones than Internet connections, the phones are being used to make people aware of the HIV/AIDS risk. In India, the mode of communication in rural areas could vary from the simple loudspeaker to a community radio, said Peter Amstrong, a former BBC broadcaster and now director of OneWorld International Foundation. From the horrific expose about the deaths of children in orphanages in China to helping around 9,000 refugees in Kosovo to get reunited with their families, OneWorld has been providing a platform for the untold stories of struggle, success and failures right from grassroots. "Who knows better than people on ground," askd Vittachi, an award-winning television producer and author of several books and articles on global justice. Vittachi is here to attend the third regional meet of the OneWorld South Asia partners to chalk out strategies to help meet the Millennium Development Goals set by the UN. The two-day meet ends Friday. Around 100 partners, including 25 from overseas, are expected to meet in the two-day session to encourage feedbacks to analyse and provide motivation and to explore ways to use technology to provide voice to ordinary people. While OneWorld is very careful in the selection of its partners and closely monitors their work, Vittachi admitted that criticism of some Indian NGOs might well be justified. "There is some anxiety that some of them may be laundering money meant for private gains, but there are others who are doing absolutely vital work at the grassroots level. These are people trying to get the voice of the grassroots people heard," Vittachi told IANS. Vittachi and her team are now trying to bypass NGOs and reach directly the poor to help them evolve their own concepts for communications. She narrated how children have been encouraged to write their queries about HIV/AIDS and put them into a box attached to an apricot tree in a Kenya school complex. These queries are discussed at a health club to help create awareness. "While some NGOs are doing exemplary work, we would now like to reach out directly to the grassroots and enable them to exchange information and give voices to the poor," said Vittachi, who was chosen by G8 to be Britain's civil society delegate to the Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force) set up at the G8 Kyushu-Okinawa Summit in 2000 to explore how to bridge the digital divide. Vittachi is happy that the voice and concerns of NGOs are finally coming to be taken on board by important multilateral bodies and at important forums like the UN, World Bank and World Trade Organisation. "Technology is a tool being used to find out what people need and help evolve simple and local solutions like in the case of the Pondicherry fishing community," she said.
Source: IANS
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