Series of Capacity Development Trainings at Grassroots Communities

Open Forum has recently completed a series of Capacity Development Training on Content for Community Needs in 6 states for the people from grassroots communities. The Training Programme was conducted by a number of experts on its panel. The training initiated in the Month of November has completed its target for capacity development of grassroots communities of 18 districts which are still on back foot. Each such Capacity Development Trainings was attended by people ranging from 29-68 thus making a sum of total 653 participants. These 653 people were also trained on Principles of Effective Writing for furthering the Building Communication Opportunities Programme of Open Forum.

Community Participants at training in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh	Participants learning skills on collation of contents at training in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh
Open Forum focussed on Women Participants and organised a special computer learning programme for them at Bhopal	Some trainings were conducted at Schools at Rural Level to involve teenagers in Social Development Activities.
Participants not even learned but also had a hands on practice on thematic areas addressed at such training programmes	Typing of text in Hindi in Unicode format and formating them for a publication was also discussed. Participants at practise.

India is largely with more than 60 per cent of our population dependent on agriculture and allied activities. It is important to address their needs with value added information. In many situations we have witnessed local knowledge coming to the rescue of major global problems. It is a fact that the knowledge base in the grassroots actually gives ways to various solutions at the global level. Similarly other global issues like the HIV AIDS, Food Security, Digital Divide; it’s the grassroots communities who can suggest appropriate strategies.

Various ICT initiatives aimed at improving access of information communication to the grassroots communities are more inclined towards pushing external information. But the fact is not all the external information provided through such initiatives is much of use to them. They are more tuned to their own information and knowledge which is local and is more relevant to their needs. It is not just the global knowledge but a balance of global and local information that helps in improving quality of life at the grassroots.

Presently, no doubt, content through Information, Education and Communications programme are reaching to the communities, but not sustaining at that level. Government, Non-Government Organisations are doing their best to empower the communities with knowledge, but their withdrawal leaves the vacuum behind. No doubt, other mainstreaming media are also playing a vital role, but there is a need to reflect on how ICTs could be used for IEC and need-based content could be made available to them.

Information needs of the community are immense. Presently they continue to remain unmet, whether its agriculture and related information for the farmers, educational opportunities for the students, health education, livelihood opportunities, employment opportunities for the unemployed, and access to market for the small entrepreneurs or government information for the citizens. Every citizen has the right to information. The challenge is how to have access to the information and how to disseminate the information. Similarly, every community has the reservoirs of local knowledge. How to harness this local knowledge and what should be the sharing mechanism from one community to another; from one village to another; from one block to another; from one district to another and how to share the global knowledge, needed at the local level. It seems to be a marathon task. But, small efforts can show the way. On the one hand the process of collecting, collating, conceptualizing and disseminating of information and knowledge has to be built, on the other hand, the environment for accessibility and acceptability of the knowledge sharing mechanism has to be created with the ultimate goal of connecting communities and empowering people.

Participants at a Hands on Training at one of a Capacity Development Training workshop held in Uttar Pradesh	Expert Panel included Mr. Kumar Aman, who has been deeply involved in such Capacity Development Training workshop
Writing Skills was one of an important issue which was discussed and teached at Training workshops	Women Participants listening to the expert in one such Capacity Development Training workshop

In recent times, the digital medium has demonstrated distinct advantages over traditional approaches of reaching out to communities and has a great potential to empower communities in voicing their voices. Present services through internet are designed in English, that continue to remain outside the ambit of semi-literate communities and language become the main barrier in accessing and assimilating the e-knowledge. The community requirements are have information/knowledge available in local and simple language, so that everyone in the community can understand and use it. How do we address this need? One way to achieve this is to develop a pool of information/knowledge in digital format so that it is readily available for sharing via online and offline routes.

The content for community needs is immense if we take the holistic approach. But there is a need to build a system to segmentize the whole process for convenience and how content-coordination mechanism could be developed to make contents available, accessible, acceptable, communicable and sharable through various ICT tools.

Open Forum, while promoting ICTs in the communities realized the importance of blending of local vis-à-vis global content and the unprecedented urgency and need to digitize content to reach out to rural and urban communities of South Asia, as well as tailor the content as per the respective needs of the communities. Organizations - including NGOs, donors, multilateral organizations, private sector, media, academicians and governments as its partners, took the initiative of strengthening the content database for catering to these needs, but to fill-in the gap, there is a need to build content coordination mechanism.

Open Forum has recently completed a series of Capacity Development Training on Content for Community Needs in 6 states for the people from grassroots communities. The training was initiated in the Month of January 2008 with a training workshop at Saraikella-Kharsawan district of Jharkhand and concluded with its last training in this series at Madhubani, Bihar. During the training duration it covered 18 districts of the chosen 6 states with total 653 participants in this series. The module focused on Content for Community Needs and Principles of Effective Writing included issues as following:

Content for Community Needs
• Content collection and dissemination (static as well as dynamic)
• Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, Affordability
• Digitizing the content
• Format and language
• Dissemination strategy
• Copyright issues
• Acknowledging the contributions
• Role of government/non-government organizations
• Technical support

Principles of Effective Writing
• It was explained that what communication is
• Why is Communication Important
• Importance of Information and Knowledge
• Local vis-à-vis global content
• Development of Communication Tools in India
• Develop Content Collating Skills
• Ways to collect Information and Knowledge
• What is the effect of Communication
• The Communication Process
• Communication Techniques
• Process of Communications
• Who would be the communicators
• Principals to receive details on Contents communication Strategy
• To know details of content through the use of Questions
• Principals to follow while compiling information into a story or content
• Strategies related with the collation of information
• Principle of effective writing
• Key aims of a newsletter
• Planning a Newsletter

There is a need felt for development of digitized content for community needs, especially for rural communities, realizing the urgent need of digitized content in the era of Information Society. This series of Capacity Development Training highlighted the need to develop content partnerships in a participatory manner, with the initial task of identifying organizations and developing coordinating mechanisms for content creation. Also these Training Workshops witnessed to share content and make it available to the communities. Content (knowledge) is the key to development of any community. Content exists in labs (institutions) and land (communities). What needs to be streamlines is the content flow from lab to lab, lab to land, land to land, land to lab. Content for communities vary from place to place. It is generally said that the only one third of the content need to come from sources external to communities and the two third of it is available in the community itself that need to be shared among themselves.

Participants not even learned but also had a hands on practice on thematic areas addressed at such training programmes	Typing of text in Hindi in Unicode format and formating them for a publication was also discussed. Participants at practise.

Each Capacity Development Training workshop was of three days and was devised under various sessions so that important issues could be discussed keeping in view the grassroots realities and contents could be collated, conceptualized, digitized and disseminated. In Each Capacity Development Training workshop discussions with participants were focused on various themes such as, Health and Population, Livelihoods, Environment, Agriculture, Governance and Education.