CEMCA Master training for Women Broadcasters, New Delhi, November 17-20, 2013
New Delhi; 10/12/2013: While the Community Radio movement in India is fairly young, the achievements and accolades it has won both within the communities it works with and the larger nation is remarkable. The sector has also been working towards bridging the digital divide and there are several structural barriers that are hard to alter and increasing women’s participation in the sector remains a key challenge. Maraa, a Bangalore based media and arts collective, on behalf of the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) organized a master training focused on mutual capacity sharing between women broadcasters to create participatory programming on 17 -20 November, 2013 at Ghitorni, New Delhi. At the workshop the community radio stations also took their first step towards planning cascade workshops, where they would go back and train women in their communities to make participative programmes.
This four-day capacity building workshop also provided an opportunity to 9 radio stations (North Zone) to attain conceptual clarity on the Community Learning Program (CLP) model developed by Commonwealth of Learning through collaboration with various global partners.
The participants were introduced to various tools that can be used for developing a radio series that blends ‘outcome-oriented learning design’ with ‘process-oriented dialogue’ and stakeholder participation. This also forms the core of the CLP model. The model is in sync with the objective of increasing women’s participation in community radio at all levels of decision-making in a community radio programme.
While the concept is fairly new in India, it has been tried and tested in various parts of the world and many see this as a paradigm shift where the focus is on involving local stakeholders in decision making processes (topic selection, message design, program design etc.) right from the inception of the program plan.
Gurgaon Ki Aawaz was the first station to pilot this model in India with Maraa’s support. So far they have produced 16 episode series on the issue of ‘White discharge’ a common problem amongst women in the community they are working with. Post this training all nine stations take steps to organize local training programmes to further train at least 10 more women broadcasters, and produce issue based CLP through in-depth formative research, outcome oriented learning design and initiate a process of dialogue between various stakeholders in their respective communities. CEMCA intends to build the capacities of 180 Women Broadcasters through this initiative, and improve the quality of programming by Community Radio stations.
