New Delhi, March 2005: The Annual Regional Meeting (ARM), 2005 was a milestone, a vantage point from which OneWorld South Asia
(OWSA), its trustees, partners and other development professionals could review the progress for the preceding year and plan strategies for the coming year. It was also an opportunity to consolidate its identity as a grassroots communications organisation based in India and serving in South Asia, while focusing on voicing the voiceless by the voiceless themselves.
Rationale
OWSA is striving towards the creation of a platform that will serve as a springboard for development direction for the same being provided by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by 189 governments at the United Nations Millennium Summit, 2000. OWSA believes that the achievement of a dramatic reduction in poverty and marked improvement in the quality of life of the poor through meeting the eight MDGs calls for a focussed, convergent strategy involving stakeholders from the entire region.
Given the current emphasis on knowledge intensive sustainable development efforts globally, it was felt that knowledge needs to be integrated in the life of communities that share similar values, beliefs, languages and approaches for empowering the underprivileged. Communities of Practice (CoPs) would significantly contribute to the ability of all the stakeholders to learn and share knowledge and experiences to achieve the MDGs. Therefore OWSA adopted the theme Building CoPs for Achieving the MDGs for its regional meeting this year.
Proceedings
More than 500 development professionals, including 82 from South Asia, actively participated in the deliberations. The idea behind the meeting was to start a process that would enable the development community to build CoPs for achieving the MDGs in partnership with multiple stakeholders at the national level in India. This initiative is expected to give impetus to similar initiatives in other countries in South Asia.
The meeting was organised around five themes:
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Poverty reduction, food security and sustainable livelihoods;
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Education for empowerment;
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Health, water and sanitation;
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Combating epidemics; and
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Promoting good governance.
Critical issues that emerged from the parallel thematic sessions were then discussed in the plenary so that all delegates got an opportunity to share views on all thematic discussions, even the ones that they did not attend. By the end of the meeting, linkages between the five themes were apparent to all. There was extensive discussion on the questions of equity, accessibility and outreach, capacity building, accountability and benchmarks of effectiveness.
Defining development goals
The thematic sessions addressed strategic questions about whether we could rely on dominant development paradigms and encouraged the adoption of alternative development models that would be sustainable for all. It was recommended that in South Asia, poor people should be allowed access to the basic resources that they need land, water and biodiversity they should be empowered to decide for themselves and to prioritise their requirements of food security and livelihood. In the final analysis, it is the poor themselves who can do a far better job of eliminating poverty than anybody else.
Presentations by the government functionaries informed about various schemes and programmes aimed at improving delivery mechanisms for essential services like food grain distribution, water distribution and health care services. There was also candid discussion about the lacunae in these systems and the need to eliminate corruption, ensure transparency and accountability and to install management information systems for increased efficiency. It was acknowledged that it may not be practical to expect governments to deliver all these services without active partnerships with private sector, and NGOs.
But it is also the role of citizens to ensure that the services delivered actually reach the correct destination. There was much debate on the need to acknowledge the role of multi-stakeholder partnerships, aggregating the unique resources and competencies of governments, corporations, and civil society organisations to meet key development challenges. The role of private sector in general, and multinationals in particular, was sometimes seen in critical light, as commercial setups aiming for unlimited economic gain at the cost of poor peoples livelihoods and ecological degradation. This risk can only be eliminated if we form strong alliances within civil society groups and then form partnerships, which are driven by an agenda of equity and sustainability, and which preclude domination and exploitation.
Information for rural transformation
The transformative power of information in the hands of rural people was demonstrated by the examples of e-Choupal, Thai Ruralnet and Village Knowledge Centres (VKCs). In all these examples, the identification, collection and dissemination of information was determined in partnership with the rural communities, and facilitated by NGOs and corporates. They demonstrated that the availability of information empowered rural communities, assisting them in pro-active decision making about the adoption of farming practices, marketing the produce, access a whole range of information, products and extension services, and participation in social mobilisation activities such as livestock management, water distribution and womens empowerment. These centres are now considering e-healthcare and e-governance as other examples of services that could be made accessible to people.
Some critical factors in the success of these projects were:
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Involvement of the community in project planning and implementation. This led to a sense of ownership in the rural community
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Location of a central hub for information sharing in the community, where relevant content suited to local requirements was stored and updated for easy retrieval
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Fanning out of the knowledge centre to provide space for other community activities such as Self Help Groups, vocational training, and capacity building for marketing
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Creative use of alternative communication media like public address systems, electronic display board, local newspaper and local radio for disseminating critical information
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Feedback systems that enable the community to measure the impact of the project on their lives. This motivated them to involve people from surrounding areas as well.
Various presentations illustrated strategies for improved delivery of education, training and skill building through formal and non-formal institutions using ICTs, distance education, multi-media and radio. The example of Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (BYST), India, illustrated a successful model where poor youth are provided with capital by BYST, along with mentoring by experts from the corporate sector, to set up successful business ventures. There were special sessions on the skill-building of women and their access to resources that lead to empowerment and capacity building for self employment, leadership, and successful negotiation in public spaces as well as in political spheres.
Education was also seen as a crosscutting theme requiring convergent strategies that are likely to reverse some regressive trends like increasing unemployment, alarming incidence of epidemics and child mortality, etc. and support an accelerated pace of change. It is a powerful tool for infusing rights-based and gender-just value systems, for arresting environmental degradation and encouraging environment friendly practices. Education is also a platform for sharing knowledge about the biological as well as social factors affecting health. Education can help to disseminate relevant, simple, life-saving information that will enable people to live in a healthy manner. It was also considered important to share unbiased information that would explode traditional myths and reduce the stigma around some diseases like T.B. and HIV/AIDS. Thematic sessions on combating epidemics focussed on education as one of the key strategies for prevention and cure.
Role of ICTs
Some delegates were skeptical about the relevance of ICTs in eliminating poverty. Various programmes have been launched in different parts of Asia, to harness the power of ICTs and it is necessary to review these from time to time to identify case studies, best practices, and challenges in order to increase the benefits reaped from them. This requirement was addressed through presentations by the National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NCAP) India, and the APDIP (Asia Pacific Development Information Program) at UNDP, Thailand.
Both the studies conclusively showed proven benefits through the use of ICTs in the areas of agriculture, improved healthcare and education. They indicated that while ICTs can break barriers to human knowledge, increase participation and enhance economic opportunity, their performance can be affected by limitations such as inadequacy of subject matter, lack of location-specific or user-oriented information in local languages, lack of capable facilitators to disseminate information, lack of infrastructure and inadequate access to resources. Unless ICTs reach the villages, the digital divide will not lessen and peoples potential will not be realised. The most disadvantaged have the lowest levels of access and miss out on many of the benefits; we need innovative solutions that factor this in.
Key outcomes of the meeting
The meeting concluded with resonance on the urgent need for economic, social empowerment, capacity building and co-operation that would strengthen and involve grassroots communities and women. The two-day meeting concluded with a consensus on the formation of some CoPs, both digital and physical, around the various issues that had emerged everyone went back with a great sense of responsibility for the tasks that lay ahead, and a shared vision of equitable, environment-friendly development and sustainable livelihoods for all.
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