Category: Projects

Mobile phones have become instrumental in global efforts to drive awareness and encourage behavior change to build equitable societies across the world. Mobile Vaani has been at the forefront of doing this across India, reaching over 2 million people.

As we press the pedal and accelerate our work in 2018, here are some examples of our efforts towards positive social change with our partners which have been successful – examples that demonstrate the variety of ways in which communication has been and can be used for change. Each of these projects brought out unique insights into the motivation of people to seek information, the wide breadth of methods that can be used to reach different user segments, and best practices to follow when designing ICT interventions.

Given the demonstrable success of these projects, we also want to expand their reach to more people in newer geographies. On average, all it takes to reach an additional person with messages on positive change is INR 25 per month – which is only INR 300 for a whole year! More information on our specific asks are in the individual posts below.

We hope you wish to contribute to taking the messages of equity to more people in the rural and low-income heartlands of India. Do write back to us at contact@gramvaani.org to discuss ideas for collaboration, for more information on any of these projects, or to take forward co-funding opportunities with us or our partners.

Empowering Women

Improving health outcomes


Building equitable, resilient societies

Government grievance redressal services are complicated and centralised, putting them out of reach and relevance of citizens in rural areas. They were built to keep ‘middlemen’ out, but end up making it harder for citizens to access grievance redressal and for social workers to help them with the process.

Gram Vaani and UNDP built a cadre of volunteers in Raipur, Chattisgarh, to train community members on rights & entitlements & on using govt grievance redressal services. Our pilot of this replicable model was successful, with 78% of community members finding this useful and 84% wanting it to continue. Volunteers also report how it has earned them respect in the community, given them digital skills and access to employment opportunities.

We want to sustain the volunteer programme, scale it to other districts and pitch it to government departments to embed it into their systems. Please write to us at contact@gramvaani.org to know more.

by Vani Viswanathan

“What do I need a phone for? If I ever need to talk to someone, I ask my son and he helps me…”

This woman from Chandi block is a member of one of the 10,000 women Self Help Groups (SHGs) that we are working with as part of our JEEViKA Mobile Vaani project in Bihar’s Nalanda district. JEEViKA MV is an IVRS based information sharing platform developed in partnership with Project Concern International and the Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society (popularly known as JEEViKA) and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

JEEViKA Mobile Vaani provides rural women information on maternal dietary diversity and complementary feeding practices. It reinforces messages on nutrition that these women hear in their SHGs and seeks to create more conversations in the household on this topic to hasten the adoption of these healthy practices.

As we began our formative studies to inform our content and engagement strategy, we knew the singular biggest challenge that this project would face: ownership of phones among women is low; most share their phones with family members. Older women, like the one quoted above from Chandi block, aren’t interested in using a phone, as they do not see any use for it except for conversations with family members. How, then, were we going to reach women and their families with information crucial to improving maternal health and child health?

The digital gender divide across India

In our decade-long experience of providing technology-led solutions for development issues, the digital gender divide is a constant factor to address to ensure that the benefits of these solutions reach a wider and more inclusive audience. Indeed, India’s gaping digital gender divide is the subject of much news and research; one of the latest is from LIRNEAsia, which found that only 43 percent of Indian women owned mobile phones as compared to 80 percent of the men, with the gap increasing in rural areas.

Why is it that women’s ownership – and use – of mobile phones is so much lower than men’s? Many factors play a role, most of which can be traced back to the patriarchal nature of Indian societies. In the short history of mobile phones, their usage by women has been held ‘responsible’ for many things, ranging from sexual violence to claims that it ‘encourages’ promiscuity. In many villages across the country, local (unofficial) councils ban women from using mobile phones for these very reasons. In a typical rural household, women do have access to phones but these are shared with other family members, and often they don’t know how to use the phone for anything except to receive calls from relatives. The common refrain is why women need phones and who she needs to talk to when much of her work is within the house.

How JEEViKA Mobile Vaani brought more female listeners in

We leveraged the strong network of SHGs that are part of JEEViKA to test some unique steps to bring this information to more women and to generate intra-household conversation on these “women’s” topics. Our interventions have demonstrated reasonable success: today, JEEViKA MV has over 30,000 registered female users, with nearly a third of them engaging with it regularly.

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  Mobile literacy modules at SHGs: Most women attending the SHG meetings would not bother bringing their mobile phones to these meetings. Many of these women were over 40 years old, and with age the disinclination to learn to use the phone became stronger. Our field teams trained the Community Mobilisers who lead the SHGs to explain to the SHG members how to use the mobile phone, including basics such as dialling numbers, saving them, etc. Through constant encouragement, more and more women started bringing their phones to the SHG meetings: from 20-30% of members when we started the project, to 50-60% now, in a space of 15 months.

Why does this matter? For one, it helps women claim ownership over the mobile phones, which until then they only passively used, for receiving calls. For another, many of these women, aged over 40, are mothers-in-law, who traditionally hold much control over their sons’ and daughters-in-law’s lives on a range of issues such as family planning, diet during pregnancy, breastfeeding practices, etc. Getting these women to listen to JEEViKA MV is a way of increasing household conversations on these topics and to encourage faster adoption of healthier reproductive and maternal practices in the household.

• Diversifying content: Surveys on the platform usage after the first six months indicated some self-selection: users who did not have a pregnancy or an infant in the house were dropping out, saying they were busy with household chores. However, the goal of the platform is to create a broad user base even among families without pregnant women or infants, as this would lead to greater household involvement and conversations around maternal and infant nutrition.

Therefore, we decided to diversify the content on the platform to reach more women, and asked them through surveys what topics they wanted to hear more on. Women answered that they were most interested in information about children’s education, local news and agriculture. In the subsequent months, we began generating content on these topics as well, which were not part of the original plan for the project. One such programme, Guru Mantra, is a ‘superhit’ among women as it gives useful tips to help children study and retain information better. Such diversified content helped increase the usage by 50%, and also led to a greater consumption of the core health and nutrition content.

• Bringing the men in: Diversifying content on the platform also led to increased usage of the platform among other household members, especially men. Men now have a channel to get local news, advice on agriculture, suggestions related to children’s education, etc. This has led to wider listenership and built trust on the platform, reducing the questions they would raise earlier to their wives and daughters accessing this platform over the phone. We also received several anecdotes about the men hearing content on nutrition for their children and sanitation for their families and taking positive steps towards behaviour change. 

MAMTA’s Janani Swasthya Sewa is an infoline designed specially for young married women on reproductive health issues such as contraception, birth spacing and pre- and post-natal care. It is also used by ASHA workers (frontline health workers) in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh to support their field work.

Here is our plan to take this project further. Write to us at contact@gramvaani.org to know more or contribute to co-funding this project!

Did you know that the famous Sesame Street program has an Indian version as well? It is called Galli Galli Sim Sim, and is telecast regularly on Pogo and other kids channels. The program brings about a fun way to teach primary school children basic health and hygiene practices, language pronunciation, manners and etiquette, rhymes and stories, and various other topics.

About two years back, Gram Vaani and Sesame began ideating if the TV program could be made available over radio, thus increasing its reach to lower income demography that may not have a TV set. We went even further, and discussed what if the programs could be made available on phone? Mobile phones have an outreach of 76% in poorest R4 segment of rural areas, while radio and television at just 11% and 9% respectively.

The result was a very interesting program we together ran across the Mobile Vaani network of 10 community radio stations in the Hindi belt. The stations would air the Sesame content, and also make it available on phone where kids could listen toll-free by simply placing a missed call to the number. Several engaging programs were also conducted, including a poetry competition for school children.

Read an article in The Hindu about the project.

An evaluation exercise was recently concluded and came up with very positive results. With permission from Sesame, we are reproducing some of the main results of the evaluation:

1. The project has helped:
   • build capacity of stations in project management and documentation
   • provided new ideas for content creation for children – how to interact with children
   • has helped find a new way into schools
   • increased community interaction
   • have gained knowledge about research methodologies
   • technical know-how of new technologies, new technologies have also helped increase participation
   • new programs will be created to keep children engaged, to include learning from this project
2. Listenership information is primarily collected through unstructured means – through call in, letters, visits, community visits etc
3. Techniques that work with children: Community segment/Radio on Telephoy and live call in were seen to be great ideas for child/community engagement
4. CR stations have also reported to have helped improve time management and team skills through this project
5. Some stations shared that more funding would be helpful, conference facility on GRINS is a common demand
6. In addition to childrens content, content specific to demands of the community will be created
7. Most CR stations shared that GGSS content will be re-broadcasted and community segments, more experts to be added, narrowcasting of episodes – post July 2013.
8. All stations have shown interest in conference facility and use of Radio on Telephony.

Thanks Sesame for this opportunity to work on an exciting project. Look forward to more such interactions on Mobile Vaani.