Recipient Institution:
Change Initiatives

5GC-79; Salt Lake City; Sector-3; Kolkata: 700106; West Bengal; India

Tel/Fax: 91-33-2337-9748

Email: suryatirtha@vsnl.com

Project Leader:
Mr. Suryatirtha Ray

Amount and Duration: US$ 9,016 / 12 months

Commencement Date:
July 2004

Abstract of Project
Change Initiatives is seeking a small grant of $9,000 to explore the scope of raising awareness and promoting the use of Web content among the poor women of West Bengal, through k-yan, a novel computing device built in India.

This is part of the work that Change Initiatives and UNESCO will be doing in the second phase of their award-winning ICT project Nabanna, which is a web-based information system to address gender concerns. The work is intended to ensure greater access of poor, uneducated women to the contents of a web-enabled database. It will reinforce Nabanna's existing off-line information dissemination structures for the project's online contents.

With non-users of computers getting to interact with Web contents after the project, a major hurdle before Nabanna's implementation will be removed.

The focal point of our work will be research. A global team of researchers have developed the Ethnographic Action Research Methodology that will be used integrate k-yan within Nabanna's activities. After a year we expect our research to reveal innovative processes through which 165 poor women improve their health condition and livelihood situation. The results will be replicated among 500 more poor women in the subsequent phase of the project.

The processes fit in with our overall aim to build a web-enabled database of localised best practices that will support local women to solve local problems.