Kondagaon Workshop – Day Two

To engage the people that need it most, CGNet holds workshops all over Central India. CGNet can often be difficult to understand, so it is important to train people who can act as ambassadors and correspondents into the future. This series of blog posts will follow three workshops held in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh to give you an insight into how we work.

 

The CGNet Swara system – people calling up, reporting community problems, pushing for action on these issues – while apparently straightforward, does contain some difficulties. There is a tricky trade-off we have to think about: a balance must be negotiated between accessibility and efficacy. In other words, CGNet Swara must be simple enough for many, many people to be able to understand and contribute to yet this must be balanced with good enough quality recordings that can be acted upon.

‘Good enough quality’ means a number of things: a focus on, broadly, community problems (rather than personal ones); a succinct description of the problem; clear identification of the contributor (so if follow-up information is required they can be contacted) and an accurate location (village, block, district and state).

A discussion works outside

 This is why a three/four day workshop is a necessary thing. Users of CGNet often require a solid introduction to the service and clear instructions about using it. In the previous workshop in Narayanpur, teaching the young participants about how to identify themselves properly was a particular challenge yet even here in Kondagaon with a relatively more educated group, people must still be taught how to contribute useable reports.

For instance, one of our workers was talking to a group about the kind of problems they might have and one of them told him that she was a teacher and had not received her salary for three months. This is a personal problem and not technically within CGNet’s mission statement of giving a platform to community concerns. Yet, obviously, a teacher not receiving her salary affects the community at large and, after asking more questions, the worker learned that many teachers in her area were facing the same problems. Without too much work, it is easy to see that this problem is part of a larger one and this larger problem is one that CGNet is the perfect service to publicize.

A participant receives feedback on a practice recording