Digital Communication for Development in Nepal: An Evaluation of the Digital Broadcast Initiative

As reported here, author Gabriella Westberg travelled to Nepal on January 7 2004 to carry out 3 months of interviews with listeners, partners, and initiators of the 18-month pilot project Digital Broadcast Initiative (DBI), which was designed and implemented by the nonprofit organisation Equal Access in conjunction with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-Southeast Asia. DBI used digital satellite technology, discussion groups, and radio dramas to deliver information about HIV/AIDS and other issues to economically poor, marginalised communities - in particular, adolescent girls in the far west of Nepal.

As Westberg explains, by the end of the 1990s, the project was presented at workshops as a small-scale, participatory narrowcast digital initiative to "bridge the digital divide and give equal access to information." In 2001, a wider conceptual frame was developed that centred around a flagship radio drama circling around the main character of Thuldidi - a name that means "elder sister" in Nepali. On this framework, the project was envisioned through an image of 3 interacting rings, one of which corresponded to Outreach Partners, another to Assessment Partners, and the third to Content Partners. Ideally, the 3 rings would interact in a sphere called "dialogue".

However, Westberg contends that "Communication channels were clogged in and between every level. In short, that blurred sphere that project designers called 'dialogue' - as illustrated in the graph on Equal Access' official webpage...[click here to view it] was nowhere to be found; and no one seemed to be too alarmed about it....I found an overall system of systematic misrecognition." To cite concrete examples of such communication breakdowns offered within Westberg's piece:

• Outreach - There were issues with the scope of the project, and access to its outputs: "To the five core Outreach Partners...two organizations related to other UNDP-led project were added, and another two governmental organizations were added upon a request from UNICEF. By accepting these additional organizations, Equal Access was to deliver more than 400 receivers, instead of the initially planned 150....The receivers, even though cheap on the global digital radio market, were over a hundred dollars each - very expensive from a Nepalese point of view. Equal Access was thus convinced to add to the narrowcast-gone-broadcast a rebroadcast network of local FM stations." Based on various issues regarding where Outreach Partners were located within Nepal, "some people had a variety of channels to hear the same messages, while those initially chosen to be the target audiences had none."
• Assessment - There were discrepancies and inaccuracies with regard to the work of the Assessment Partners, who were envisioned to consist of an in-country monitoring team, the Valley Research Group (VaRG), and The University of California [UCLA], San Francisco, Center for AIDS Prevention. Westberg suggests that, "in a context of such complexity as the Nepalese, and with such varieties of activity on the ground as in the DBI project, perhaps the quantitative method developed by the academic experts of UCLA - to be carried out by local interviewers with a shortage of time and in hard conditions - did not really fit. An extensive qualitative research should have been carried out before making up the quantitative survey..." For instance, in the author's assessment:
  
  • The 2003 Baseline Assessment Document (which the author calls "BAD") included some figures about literacy in Nepal that conflicted sharply with those included in the national Central Bureau of Statistics' census. Westberg claims that, when she asked - almost a year and a half later - how literacy was defined in the BAD survey, "no one could recall for sure....The VaRG interviewers carried out the interviews during a combination of heavy monsoon, harvest season and State of Emergency, which could have lessened interviewees' willingness to participate."
  • Even though VaRG was "supposed to conduct a 'periodic monitoring' of the DBI project...[a]s late as January 2004, VaRG had not been able to conduct even one single periodic monitoring, since no data at all had come in from the Outreach Partner organizations. Admittedly, they had not asked for it either. In the Equal Access office in Katmandu...this was news."
  • "Feedback on content did not, like the 'periodic monitoring', happen at all during the first year. One of many reasons was that even though the project was officially launched, the actual radio receivers were locked-up in the customs for months. As they finally reached the sites, monsoon had hit Nepal..." Further, the author found that "The interpretation of the concept of 'facilitation was not the same among local Outreach Partners of the DBI as in Equal Access San Francisco." According to Westberg, though, "Neither lack of feedback nor delay of radio receivers did stop the Content Team to continue producing the show....The idea of keeping content flexible according to listener's feedback was thus abandoned already in the early autumn of 2003."
• Content - Issues included:
  
  • Gender issues in content creation: "The content advisors consisted of one male expert on education, one male medical doctor and one male social economist, as well as 'the mother of Thuldidi', the woman who had pitched the conceptual central character of the drama, who however quit after a while" because, reportedly, "There was no interactivity with listeners, but there was a bunch of Katmandu-based male experts brainstorming about what remote villagers needed to know."
  • The general objectives in terms of content were to follow the preferences of the donors, which left some topics off-limits...
  • Relevance: "A great number of interviewees stated that awareness rising on HIV/AIDS was surely very important, but that there was not really anyone living with HIV/AIDS in their community, a reason why it did not feel like urgent information....The programs on health and sanitation are popular, but sometimes too complex."

Despite the shortcomings noted above, in a final section of the report titled "From a distorted pilot study to a successful production house", Westberg notes that today, Equal Access-Nepal's Katmandu office "is growing fast. In January 2006, the office contained a staff of around 20 employed, in-house experts, in-house producers and even their own radio jockeys. They do not rely solely on the outreach partners to reach out any longer, but travel around from time to time themselves to 'interact' with potential listeners. By the end of 2005, multimedia stations were introduced....Equal Access has exported the DBI project to Cambodia, Laos, India, Tajikistan and Afghanistan."