The Tansen Community Multimedia Centre (CMC) initiative in Nepal is part of a regional innovation and research project initiated by UNESCO to study the potential of information and communi-cation technologies (ICTs) for poverty reduction. The project is looking for ways to use ICTs as a tool to empower and strengthen the voices of the poor.

Community multimedia centres are an extension of UNESCO’s long-standing work with community radio, inspired by the increasingly important role played by new digital technologies. CMCs like the one in Tansen combine traditional community media - in Tansen’s case video, cable TV and print - with new media tools like computers and Internet.

The goal is to explore ways that Tansen can use ICT as dynamic development tool: to bring more voices and cultural forms, ideas and issues into the community’s media space, and to provide poor, marginalised youth with new skills and opportunities.

The combination of established local media, like community TV with new technologies like Internet, opens up great possibilities to link small, comparatively inaccessible towns and villages like Tansen to new global networks. New media are not only powerful tools for producing content, they are also gateways to ever expanding information and knowledge resources.


Life in the hills
Tansen is a hill town some 300 kms by road, west of Kathmandu. Once the seat of the Sen Dynasty, it is now the headquarters of Palpa district in western Nepal. Perched on the rim of a fertile valley, Tansen is about 30 kms into the Himalayan foothills and 60 kms from Nepal’s border with India.

The population of the Tansen municipality is about 25,000, made up of a mix of ethnic communities and traditional caste groupings. Like the rest of Nepal and much of South Asia, a majority of the population are youth below the age of 18 years. The townspeople are predominantly Newar Buddhists and Brahmin and Magar Hindus. Though officially a thing of the past, traditional caste, trade and ethnic groupings are still a very strong part of Tansen’s social fabric.

Historically a regional centre, like many hill towns in the Himalayan belt, Tansen is increasingly isolated from the plains where growth, trade and mobility are higher. Palpa also faces the pressures of migrating labour and instability due to ongoing conflict between Nepal’s government and Maoist insurgents. There are few local jobs or business opportunities through which young people can hope to make a decent living and the situation is worse for the poor, women and people from marginalised castes.


A centre for media innovation
Tansen has an unusually wide range of local media for a relatively small and isolated hill town. Tansen’s media mix includes three local FM radios in the town itself (all established in mid-2004), one from nearby Madanpokhara village as well as a weekly community-oriented paper, two cable networks, a local television producer and the CMC.

Cable TV started in Tansen in the early 1990s with the emergence of satellite and cable technology in South Asia, a combination that was to dramatically change the region’s media environment and give rise to thousands of small, local cable operations.

In Tansen, video production and cable distribution grew in response to the absence of either Nepali language or local content programming available via satellite in the early 90s. In the following years, local musicians and media enthusiasts using basic equipment and volunteer labour created one of South Asia’s only local television programmes, running more or less uninterrupted for over ten years.

Community multimedia for youth
With support from UNESCO, the Tansen TV group expanded their set-up in early 2003, adding a computer network and basic digital production facilities. Over the course of the first year, some 175 youth participants, most between the age of 16 to 20 years, were recruited and trained in video, multimedia and computer skills. A high percentage among them now contribute as volunteers to a range of local media: a weekly TV show called The Local Programme, a local community website and as of 2004, an online version of a local community-oriented newspaper called Deurali.

“The main criterion to get entry in this centre is poverty. I mean the poor and marginalised young people could only get opportunity in the centre. So being poor, it has given me the opportunity to be the student of the centre. I came to know that the centre was built for the poor people. The centre is helping students to an extent to be able to work in society.” Interview with Tansen CMC participant.

The CMC emphasises the participation of girls, achieving a roughly 65:35 ratio with boys, and has proactively recruited youth from poor families and marginalised caste groups. Approximately 15 per cent of youth trained in the first year are from so called low caste groups. The youth are trained together in batches of 30-40 learning both computing and media production skills. They plan and produce their own multimedia programming, using digitial video cameras and production software like Microsoft Moviemaker and Adobe Premiere. Their video productions end up as part of The Local Programme cablecast Saturday nights 7-8 pm to some 1200 households in the municipality and adjoining rural areas.

The idea is to enable and amplify the voice of marginalised local youth, to improve both the quantity and quality of local media programming and to introduce new formats that actively combine Tansen’s various media: TV, radio, print and websites. In the process the CMC hopes to foster a sense of community ownership that will support an increasingly wide range of local media. After one year of youth training programmes, the CMC began designing new training programmes for specific groups, e.g. housewives, campus MA lecturers, etc.

Facility
For ICT training and public access there are 10 networked computers and a server and a printer/scanner. For video production there are 3 computers, 2 computers for training and student work, 2 video cards and 4 video cameras. Audio production equipments include 2 computers, an audio mixer, and 3 digital audio recorders. For Internet connectivity, there is a radio modem access point and two radio modems.

Skills and empowerment
Although the link between poverty and media training and production is not immediately clear to many observers, the CMC’s work with poor local youth does several things that are important in reducing poverty: develops skills, builds confidence and inspires self-expression and participation in wider community spaces. A good example is the story of the Hitangas:

“Som and Manoj Hitanga are cousins from the traditional shoemaker caste, which because of the association with feet and with animal hide has traditionally been considered as ‘untouchable caste’. Recruited in the first batch, Som and Manoj are two of the CMC’s most promising trainees. They quickly mastered the computing and video production skills taught in the basic curriculum and have gone on to learn advanced digital production applications like Adobe Premiere. They have contributed a number of features to The Local Programme and since Som took over the regular feature on community activities, townspeople regularly come to knock on the door of his home to inform him of local happenings and events. Some time back, the owner of a cable network in India recruited and offered both Som and Manoj jobs to help start up and produce a local cable programme in Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. Although they went to Gorakhpur, they returned back to Tansen after less than a week as they were not happy in a big Indian city in the plains.” Notes from field visit to Tansen.

While the CMC facilitators are aware that not all students will find employment through their new skills, the handful that have found employment – shooting and editing wedding videos, as camera operators and in the new radio stations, are a positive example for the rest, inspiring them to look for new opportunities with new skills and confidence.

Self-expression and advocacy
The CMC’s flagship production is The Local Programme, a weekly one-hour show having a 15 minute student feature, an entertainment segment that alternates between folk and pop music and a round-up of community events, meetings and different programmes. Features and the community activities are the exclusive responsibility of the CMC’s youth participants and they collaborate with CMC staff for the entertainment segments.

Participants are given a free hand in choosing topics and formats for the student features, however common themes of advocacy, awareness and self-expression have emerged. Two girls with promising skills have started an interesting series of programmes called Path of Life, featuring episodes on different local professions, most of them part of traditionally low-caste trades such as shoemakers, metalworkers, carpenters, barbers and tailors.

“Today is a very important day in my life because today our programme will be telecasted through local TV . We had worked very hard to make the programme entitled “Jeevanko Goreto” (Path of Life). It is an informative programme, giving information about the different skills, which people are using to earn their livelihood. Our Mahesh Sir has told us that this programme will be telecasted on Saturday at 6.00 pm. I was very excited to see the programme on TV, so at 6.00 pm, I switched on the TV and called all my family members to watch the programme. After a while the programme was started. When I saw our programme on TV, I was so happy that I could not express it. I had never thought that I will be able to make such a programme and I will be seen on TV. When the programme was being shown, there were many guests in my home. They also watched the programme and they were very much surprised to see me on screen. They began to ask many more questions to me. They were very much interested to know how it was possible. I told them every thing about CMC, our trainings and about local T.V. They became very happy to know all the things and they praised me for this and wished for my success”. Excerpt from a participant’s diary

Similar features have been done on local street hawkers and the changing nature of tailoring as a result of TV-influenced fashion. Other programmes have looked at the state of the municipality’s roads, explored different aspects of local culture, featured ideas for income generating activities and advocated on behalf of the local environment through programmes on garbage, pollution and preserving local fresh water springs. In addition to student productions, volunteers had produced some fifteen 10-15-minute features between May and August 2004.


Information and innovation
With a more reliable Internet connection in 2004, the Tansen CMC now started to explore ways to bring information through Internet into their local media channels. Rochak Prasanga, meaning interesting facts, features just that by exploring and searching the Internet and then presenting a regular short feature for The Local Programme.

Direct access to the Internet is also opening up new ideas and spaces for exploration. After a computer training programme for 30 housewives, a handful of women have started using email to keep in touch with family members abroad and searching the Internet for new recipes and hair styles to put to use in small businesses and their homes. To address the lack of good materials available in masters-level programmes, the CMC is introducing a specialised course in searching and using Internet for local campus lecturers.

The CMC is also developing a new programme called TV Browsing in which local youth invite guest experts to surf the web with them on camera, simultaneously translating and interpreting Internet-sourced information and showing local viewers-the vast majority of whom have never heard of the Internet, let alone seen, it – what these new technologies are all about. Viewers can request the CMC to feature particular topics and websites allowing them to surf the Internet on their televisions.


A window to the world
To some extent, the Tansen CMC counters the inaccessibility of mountain towns, and as cable penetration increases, semi rural suburbs and larger villages as well. The CMC increases local capacity to create programming and use media tools while simultaneously starting and supporting new means through which to showcase the outputs. By linking media like Internet with local radio and TV, the CMC connects Tansen to the outside world, from markets on the plains to education opportunities in the capital, just as it now links absent students and migrants with their families back home. The CMC provides hundreds with direct access to ICTs and through cable TV, radio and print, thousands more with some degree of mediated access which also provides for translation and contextualisation, not to mention overcoming barriers like literacy and the affordability of computers.

Built-in research
Like other sites in the UNESCO regional project network, the Tansen CMC has used an integrated research methodology developed in conjunction with Queensland University of Technology and London School of Economics.

The approach employs full time researchers as part of the local project team who use ethnographic research tools, including field notes, diaries and a range of interview methods to explore both what poverty means in Tansen and how it relates to what the research approach calls the local ‘communicative ecology’, essentially the complete range of communication media and information flows in a given community. The research places ICTs (radio, computers, mobile phones, print media and so on) in the context of all the ways of communicating, that are important locally, including face-to-face interaction.

The small size of the project, in terms of number of participants, the town environment, and the close-knit nature of the local team, has contributed to research playing an important role in the project and has fed naturally back into the process of planning and implementing.

Research has helped the project team to understand the nature of poverty in Tansen, particularly the role played by caste, marginalisation and powerlessness and the lack of opportunities for self-expression. Practically, the research approach has been used to identify poor students, taking into account a range of factors, more than simply economic status. Continuous interaction and a high degree of engagement with participants allowed the local team to both refine and adapt curricula for successive batches of students, creating specialised courses to meet the needs of learners.

Sustainability
With over a year of operations under their belt and a history of local production dating back more than 10 years, the Tansen CMC has many creative ideas for how to sustain their operations and provide employment and income generating opportunities for poor local youth.

The CMC is introducing a membership system through which community members and volunteers are able to use the computer and Internet facilities. The team plans to expand the hours of cablecast programming to increase viewership and hopefully community support.

The Local Programme has started to carry some small advertising with spots made by youth volunteers. The CMC offers paid video and production services for local weddings and other ceremonies. Youth who do the video shooting split the NPR 2000 fee (about USD 25) with the centre. The CMC charges NPR 750 to mix wedding video footage.

The centre has started to offer limited paid, low cost training programmes; for example, 30 housewives are paying average of NPR 900 (about USD 12) for a three-month course covering basic computers, word processing and Internet.

The CMC is also planning to introduce on-demand music and video features for cable subscribers. As new information and communication technologies continue to develop, the CMC sees its multimedia approach having greater and greater potential to offer innovative, relevant and paid services.

With three new FM radios broadcasting from Tansen, at least another four FM stations in the area as well as five TV stations in the capital, the Tansen CMC organisers feel that they are in a unique position to provide both skilled human resources as well as high quality audio and video programme productions.

The full version of this article will appear in the journal ‘Mountain Research and Development’ in November 2004. www.mrd-journal.org