Raising Saontal Voice

"Raising Saontal Voice" is built upon strategies including advocacy, training, and awards in an effort to increase the opportunities for a marginalised community to express their thoughts and ideas - and to exchange their views with rest of the world - through journalism.

Drawing on ICTs and face-to-face communication, this initiative involves:

• Advocacy: CCD Bangladesh is lobbying with media owners through daylong regional workshops in an effort to pave the way for unprivileged Saontal men and women to participate freely and actively as journalists in mainstream print and electronic media, as well as to encourage accurate coverage of issues that are of interest to this ethnic group. Participants include publishers, editors, leaders of press clubs and journalist unions, professors of journalism, and potential Saontal journalists.
• Training and dialogue:
  1. During a 6-month period, groups of 30 Saontal male and female potential journalists are being trained through in-house learning and field-based work. CCD Bangladesh resource persons (journalists and teachers of mass communication and journalism from Dhaka and Rajshahi University) are facilitating these programmes, with the help of printed handouts and multimedia presentations. Then, each of the trainees takes part in a 4-month internship with a local, regional, or national newspaper, followed by an evaluation (and report) of the effectiveness of that experience.
  2. Dialogues in each of the 16 districts in the northern region of Bangladesh are designed to encourage budding Saontal journalists to focus on development issues such as poverty, education, health, and human rights - while at the same time inspiring them to integrate their indigenous knowledge, art, and culture into their reportage. Organisers hope that these in-person gatherings will also foster the building of relationships between minority development workers, potential Saontal journalists, and the working journalists of the region. Through these events, working journalists will, it is hoped, be motivated to prepare and publish positive reports and features that focus on the Saontal community.
• Awareness-building: To introduce and feed the trend of community-based active journalism in Bangladesh, CCD Bangladesh has created a printed community magazine, an e-bulletin, a series of 20-minute radio talk shows, and a website. ICTs are being used here in an effort to familiarise members of the "majority" population and policymakers with indigenous knowledge, art, culture, history, socio-economic conditions, and exploitation being experienced by the Saontal and other minority populations in Bangladesh. Participation is a strategy here: the Saontal beneficiaries of the project are playing central roles in preparing, arranging, and publishing the news and reports in the community magazine, and are preparing, conducting, and broadcasting the radio talk shows.
• Awards: In an effort to encourage journalists and media institutions to take action to support the development and empowerment of the Saontal, CCD Bangladesh is offering annual awards to 3 media institutions and 3 minority journalists who have helped call attention to the need to protect and advance the human rights of the Saontal and other minority people.

Human Rights, Sustainable Development.

CCD Bangladesh is a communication- and journalism-based non-profit, non-governmental organisation (NGO) working in the northern region of Bangladesh.