We propose community journalism training focusing on child marriages in Pakistan and train young community journalists to use digital media to report the cases and stories of child marriages. The project will amplify the voices of child brides , their plight and their miseries but will also help debunk several myths around child marriages in Pakistan. The initiative will help community understand when young children (girls and boys) are married a vicious cycle of poverty, violence, poor health, limited education and discrimination begins and leads to other violations such as domestic violence.
Topical focus:
Country:
What locality or neighborhood will your project focus on?
Peshawar
Describe the specific population with whom you will be working.
We plan to work with young community journalists and activists from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administrated Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Before the development of the proposal a small consultative meeting was organized with young community journalists from KP and FATA to have their insight on the proposed project and after expression of interest to be part of the project the proposal is prepared. Through the project we will train male and female young community journalists who will report and streamline the stories of child marriages from KP and FATA. Large number of population in this area is affected by disasters and conflicts lives under extreme poverty, in most areas of FATA common citizens have no access to internet and underrepresented online and at large without education.
Who else will be on your team to help implement the project?
Following will be our partners in the proposed intervention:
Pakhtunkhwa Civil Society Network (PCSN) which is an umbrella of 800 civil society organization (CSOs) of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and Tribal NGOs Consortium (TNC) which is an umbrella of organization working in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) will collaborate with Blue Veins in the proposed project. Following is the details of their Facebook accounts:
1) Zar Ali Khan Afridi
Coordinator (Tribal NGOs Consortium)
www.facebook.com/tribalngos.consortium
@zaraliafridi (Twitter)
2) Taimor Kamal
Coordinator (Pakhtunkhwa Civil Society Network)
www.facebook.com/groups/200481423316113
What kinds of news, stories and other content will be created?
Proposed project will report the cases, prevalence and practices of child marriages in the areas of KP and FATA. The project will document the personal experiences of the victims of the child marriages (both male and female) and will also record the reflection of their families, views of the communities and civil society groups including religious civil society as an important stakeholders in the practice of child marriages.
initiative will produce digital stories disseminated using digital media. The stories of the child marriage victims, the legal position of the child child marriages in Pakistan, its condemnation from the religious groups will also be screened during community meetings and uploaded on social media.
What technologies and digital tools do you plan to use in the trainings?
Describe the connections that you or your organization have already established or plan to establish that will contribute to the success of the project.
For the implementation of the proposed project Blue Veins has established collaboration with Pakhtunkhwa Civil Society Network (PCSN) and Tribal NGOs Consortium (TNC). Pakhtunkhwa Civil Society Network (PCSN) is a leading civil society network of KP having representation from NGOs, CBOS, journalists, lawyers, teachers, students, labor unions and others while Tribal NGOs Consortium (TNC) is union of NGOs working in Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA).
www.facebook.com/tribalngos.consortium
www.facebook.com/groups/200481423316113
Once the funding is secured our potential future partnership will be directed towards collaboration with Child Rights Movement FATA, End Violence against Women and Girls Alliance KP and FATA and Active Citizen Forum.
How many participants do you think will be trained in your project?
60 young community journalists including 30 male and 30 female will be trained in the proposed project. Blue Veins will identify the young community journalist directly and through the recommendation of Pakhtunkhwa Civil Society Network (PCSN) and Tribal NGOs Consortium (TNC). These young community journalists and activist will be invited to submit letter of interest describing their interest, relevance and objective to participate in the training and expression of their commitment and based on which they will be selected to ensure the continuity and sustainability of the initiative. Also preference will be given to community journalists who will be using android phones to avoid disruption and additional costs to the project.
Describe which technologies, tools, and media you will focus on when training participants.
We require 10 laptops, multimedia, one audio recorder, an audio editing software, 5 flash drives, external hard disk and internet connection. We plan to use free and open source software. Blue Veins will hire an expert level person with required knowledge and communication skills to conduct this training in an interesting learning environment so that young community journalists can learn with joy and interest. The expertise as project organizer Blue Veins and our partners brings to the project is our strategic position in the Civil Society of KP and our commitment towards the cause to bring child marriage to an end. The outreach to the target population of PCSN and TNC is of extreme value towards the success of the project.
Describe the facilities where you will hold the workshops.
The workshop will be organized at Shelton guest house in university town Peshawar which is an accessible and relatively safe place in Peshawar. The workshop place has several halls from 20 to 100 person seating capacity in all required shapes (U shape, Round Shape, Classroom shape), the guest house has several high speed WIFI connections and electricity backup system. While Blue Veins also have three (3) USB modem connections.
What is your current relationship with the community with whom you plan to work? What makes you the most appropriate individual or organization to implement this project?
Blue Veins is involved with the target population in KP and FATA on the issue of child marriages. Blue Veins is member of the Girls Not Brides UK,Member of the Provincial Legislative Review and Reform Committee, Provincial GBV response committee, Provincial and national working group to end child marriages. Blue Veins is on the advisory committee and dialogue board of the ministry of the social welfare and women development in relation to the Govt response to SGBV cases. Blue Veins also remained co-chair of the EVAW/G Alliance which is the biggest alliance of Pakistan in relation to VAW. Blue Veins also remained district GBV focal point for the District Protection Working Group (DPWG).Blue Veins is recipient of the No peace without without Justice Award of courage 2014 (Italy).
What specific challenges do you expect to face when planning and implementing your project?
We have well defined standard operating procedures, supporting logistics procedures, and security guidelines to better manage crisis situations. These policies and procedures enable staff members to know what to do on a daily basis to minimize risks, how to handle specific kind of incident, and how the organization will approach incidents. All staff is oriented about the security procedures and guidelines and held accountable to them. SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis is done before the start of any project. We foresee no major risk in the implementation of the proposed project. During the training we also plan to educate the young community journalist with “Do no harm Policy” which will reduce the risk level to the community journalist and child marriage victims
How will you measure and evaluate the project’s impact, specifically: your primary participants, the wider regional community, or the global digital community?
The success and impact of the project will be measured by the number of digital stories and coverage’s made by the community journalists and number of the listeners who follow the stories and their response to the digital stories.We will be interested to see how the global digital community follow these stories. We plan to conduct Process monitoring, performance monitoring and outcome monitoring. Which will help evaluate the project and its success at different levels.The success of the project will be measured on how positively the local media, CSOs,Policy makers and religious civil society looks into the issue of challenging and preventing child marriages in Pakistan and when community at grassroots level start to take community lead actions to put end to child marriages.
If your project were to be selected as a Rising Voices grantee, what would be the general timeline of project activities in 2014?
Dates Tasks/activities to be implemented
8/09/2014 Announcement of the training
26/9/2014 Shortlisting of the young community journalists
13/10/2014 Digital storytelling and reporting training (first training)
22/10/2014 Digital storytelling and reporting training (2nd training)
3/11/2014 Starting of publishing the digital stories on social media
23/12/2014 Evaluation of the grant and project
31/12/2014 Report and Feed back
Detail a specific budget of up to $2,500 USD for operating costs.
Budget Estimates
S.N Items Qty Unit Cost Total Local Total USD Requested BV Share
1 Hall Rent 2 15,000 30,000 309 309 0
2 Stationery 2 10,000 20,000 206 206 0
3 Tea 64 480 30,720 317 317 0
4 Lunch 64 960 61,440 633 633 0
5 Multimedia 2 6,000 12,000 124 0 124
6 Moderator 2 20,000 40,000 412 412 0
7 Travel Allw 60 1,000 60,000 619 619 0
8 Banner 2 5,000 10,000 103 0 103
9 Comm 2 5,000 10,000 103 0 103
10 Flash Drives 60 600 36,000 371 0 371
11 Headphones 60 700 42,000 433 0 433
12 Hard Disk 1 8,000 8,000 82 0 82
TOTAL (02 Workshops) 360,160 3,713 2,496 1,216
Conversion Rate: 1USD = 97 PKRs
Besides the microgrant funding, what other support can Rising Voices provide for your project to ensure its success?
We will highly appreciate if Rising Voices can streamline the work undertaken by the project to the international audience and technically support us in amplifying the voices against child marriages in Pakistan to online global community which will not only benefit the case against child marriages in Pakistan but will also create networking and exposure opportunities for Blue Veins and the young community journalists.
The fellowship of the case studies and the reports by the international community, their comments, suggestions and appreciation on community journalism on child marriages by the young community journalists will be a great encouragement and source of mobilization for them.
Contact name
Ms. Nida Batool
Organization
Blue Veins