ANANDI and KMVS teams' exposure visit to IT for Change, March 2013

The ANANDI and KMVS teams wanted to know more about IT for Change's experiences in exploring new techno-social possibilities for supporting women's collectives' empowerment process in context-appropriate ways, and the specific ICT strategies that the Prakriye field centre of IT for Change was planning to explore under the 'Making Women's Voices and Votes Count' project. Also, the KMVS and ANANDI teams, wanted to understand the specificities of working with community video and GIS platforms, as they were planning to explore these techno-social possibilities for the first time, under this project. Therefore, Lata Sachde, Bharmal Marwada, Kruti Laheru and Dilip Patel from KMVS and  Hiraben Solanki, Jahnvi Andharia and Upasana Munjpara from ANANDI visited the Prakriye field centre between 29th March 2013-1st April 2013.

In this one-week long exposure visit, the teams learnt about the technical aspects of video production such as handling the camera appropriately, ensuring audio-video sync, and working on video editing software platforms. They also discussed with the Prakriye team, various ways of addressing the main challenge of producing community video – the need to ensure that the intended messages are  communicated in an appealing way, and not in a top-down manner that is reminiscent of development communication films which are usually screened under government and NGO programmes. During the visit, the Prakriye team members also shared with the ANANDI and KMVS teams, the technical know-how of working with GIS platforms, and some of the strategies for utilising GIS possibilities to visually re-combine and re-present datasets before the community  – in order to enable women to critically engage with the micro-politics of entitlements.