Programme concept note

Ek Duniya Kayee Kahaniyan (One World: Many Stories) is a process to encourage communication by the grassroots communities in South Asia. OneWorld South Asia (OWSA) provides platform and facilitates the grassroots people to voice their concerns, to express their experiences about their life, their demands, their own rights and suggestions to solve their problems. Further, it intends to promote a culture of asserting voices, sharing knowledge in the form of stories and amplifying them to various policy-making fora through online and offline media tools.

This initiative is to promote local voices, local ideas, local knowledge and innovative approaches to help solve local issues and to provide a platform to share best practices leading to sustainable development.

OWSA is partnering with the Civil Society Organisations / Institutions to amplify the voices of the grassroots communities in selected states of India and other South Asian countries. These partner organisations nominate Ek Duniya Fellows from the community based organisations or communities.

Training workshops are organised to train fellows in basics of story telling, audio recording techniques, behaviour change communication and internet. Fellows are given a audio recording tool and a camera after the training to preferably record the stories in an audio format and to take photographs.

Fellows visit the community to record stories revolving around Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Stories are submitted in any of the South Asian language and dialect either in audio, text (written), visual, or video format.

As a part of this initiative, OWSA documents all the stories told by the people for wider dissemination among 700,000 villages in South Asia, thus promoting local knowledge for sustainable development.

The selected stories are categorised under each MDG goal, and a panel short-lists three stories under each MDG goal. Authors / narrators of the selected stories are felicitated in a ceremony.

Select stories are converted from one format into another for wider dissemination. Efforts are made to invite mainstream television channels to shoot a debate around any select story where in the author of the story can also participate along with other key speakers.