Rural India faces a severe technology deficit. Though there are other serious shortages like health facilities, water, education etc. which are known and dealt with, the role of technology in solving these and other problems is barely acknowledged.

Grassroot Community Based Organisations (CBOs) have always used traditional communication methods to reach out to their beneficiary communities for fostering development processes. Increasingly the need for two-way communication processes to understand community needs and package relevant knowledge for community empowerment has become important. This enables dialogue and allows communities to speak out, express their aspirations and concerns and participate in the decisions that relate to their development. It also provides a platform to the weaker sections to share and express their concerns and access important information about public programmes and schemes.

Development Alternatives has recognised that new technologies can help in better communication for development processes and also enhance the quality of their outreach and impact. Lack of technical knowledge and assistance, limited access to internet connectivity and poor infrastructure facilities are the main challenges faced by grassroots development communicators in Community Based Organisations.

In order to overcome these challenges, Development Alternatives has partnered with Ford Foundation to explore technological innovations for CBOs to enhance the outreach and engagement with their beneficiary communities and increase the efficiency of their operations. Some of the major issues which emerged during various interactions with Community Based Organisations and grassroots community communicators included:

• Limited technical information available and inadequate capacities to access technical information.

• Complete dependence on outside help for any technical issue or need.

• Need for more-effective and reliable means of reaching out to interior community places.

• Need for a mechanism to generate database of communities and enhance the awareness process.

Development Alternatives designed a robust mechanism to identify and collect technology innovations through a competitive method of technology incubation support to innovators and then linked them to potential users of these technologies amongst the CBOs which were surveyed. A total of 16 innovators responded with a variety of technology proposals. Out of these 7 technologies were selected by a panel of experts. 5 of these were mobile based apps while the other two were hardware technologies.

The technologies after customisation were piloted in the communities by the CBOs along with the technology innovators to understand the feasibility and scalability of the technologies. The technologies were piloted among a varied group of stakeholders which included students, health workers, women etc. These technologies addressed not just the technical challenges but also found relevance with the social issues like gender-based violence, sexual harassment, HIV awareness etc.
So far, the technologies have been successfully piloted and have proved helpful for the grassroots Community Based Organisations in building their capacities, enhancing their outreach in the communities and increasing the efficiency of their operations. It also proved helpful for the communities as these technologies are easy to access and user friendly and also provided them with an opportunity to connect to the digital space.

In the days to come, Development Alternatives plans to develop a web directory which will contain all the information related to technologies in development communication interventions. The organisation also plans to organise a policy workshop to broaden the base understanding of technological shift for communities.  ■

Jyoti Shresth
jshresth@devalt.org