The social entrepreneurial private sector is an increasingly strong player in addressing India’s inequalities in health, livelihoods, finance, agriculture, education, and more. Similarly, there are many private entities who are innovating and developing relevant consumer products to suit the local conditions in rural regions. Given this there is a strong need to understand rural India better – their understanding of issues, their demands, needs, and aspirations. In addition, it has also become critical to test and discover the community’s willingness to buy various products and services before they are rolled out in full-fledged manner.
Given the context, the federated network of participatory community media – Mobile Vaani – has become an effective mean to reach out to the desired target communities. Gram Vaani has established dedicated MV instances in 25+ districts in 5 Hindi and Tamil speaking states. It has also developed the network of volunteers and citizen journalists in these locations, who contribute and maintain diversity on the platform. To date, over 3 million unique callers have dialed in to use the virtual platform and benefit from the easy and timely access to information. Around 80k to 1 lakh users call the MV platform each month. Frequent surveys reveal that MV’s userbase comprises around 70% individuals within the age group of 25-35 years and around 60% of them are involved in agricultural activities.
Gram Vaani can leverage this MV platform and help social enterprises and consumer-centred companies to run dedicated campaigns; publicize products/services in remote rural areas in innovative ways; and gather relevant data using the MV platforms. This can give you market research insights, and help generate leads for your products and offerings.
Gram Vaani’s platforms and technologies make this possible by collecting user information to understand consumption patterns, savings and credit opportunities available to people, quality of healthcare facilities, and identify enterprising youth who can serve as distribution agents, and more.
Our platforms also allow organisations to reach out to remote areas using our app and phone technologies, to engage with the listeners through participatory feedback on campaigns, hold discussions, and to make announcements. We provider partner organisations with detailed analytics on outreach achieved to different demography, locations, and research on community response.
