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Watching movies and cutting red tape July 19th, 2015 by

It’s amazing how rapidly communication is changing in the countryside, not just the hardware, but the social arrangements that surround them. On a 2013 visit to Bangladesh, I saw two new institutions, dedicated to communication, which had both cropped up since my previous visit.

The first was a government experiment with communication, which may be paying off. The UISCs (Union Information Service Centers) are offices run by young people in local government offices. The young person is called an “uddokta,” or “entrepreneur,” and he or she helps villagers with their paperwork, not just filling in government forms, but anything at all, including photocopying, taking visa photos, finding test scores from school and checking out other stuff on the internet. Each office is well stocked with computers, cameras, printers and other communication technology, paid for by a government grant. The clever part is that the uddoktas do not earn a salary. They have to make money by charging local people for services. The ones we talked to were not making a fortune, but they seemed keen to keep doing the work.

In 2013, we wanted to see if the uddoktas could do something besides help villagers cut through the red tape. The English term “red tape” meaning excessive or picky bureaucracy comes from the days when paperwork was placed in folders, literally tied up in red ribbons (or sometimes yellow ones) and then as often as not heaped in great mounds on someone’s desk. One still sees these folders with ribbons on government desks in Bangladesh.

Some of the uddoktas received farmer learning videos on DVD, which they could play for farmers. The uddoktas were free to use the videos or ignore them. Most did play the videos, but they did it for free. We saw that the uddoktas could show learning videos to a local audience, but if they realized that they could charge a little to do so, they might be more motivated.

A second recent innovation in Bangladesh is with the private sector: “dish lines”. These are small cable companies. Some have just a few hundred subscribers, who pay a couple of dollars a month for cable TV. The company invests in a satellite dish and in a small house or a room. They download programs and run several dozen channels out to village homes on a cable, or “line”. People who run dish lines typically make one or two channels themselves, by playing movies downloaded from DVDs. The dish-line is a new idea, so it is surprising how similar the dish lines are from one town to the next. One or two guys run the cable company like a cottage industry, showing everything from news and Animal Planet in Bengali to love films from Bangladesh and West Bengal, at a reasonable price.

Like the “uddoktas”, the dish-line operators also received some farmer learning videos, and played them, but they get little feedback from their customers, and don’t really know which movies people are watching. Most of the dish-line guys said that in the future they would only play farmer learning videos if somebody paid them to do so. But the uddoktas knew that farmers liked the videos they had seen, and wanted to see more, because they had watched the programs together, in the municipal office, or in public screenings in nearby villages

The next trick will be to put these ideas together. Local government officials do know what kind of information their constituents want. We hope to next give learning videos to local officials and community-based organizations, who do have influence with the dish lines, to show videos on local cable, so that everyone can see them.

Acknowledgements

The video distribution work mentioned in this blog was done by CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) and the local NGO Agricultural Advisory Services (AAS).

The farmer learning videos distributed on DVD are all hosted on the Access Agriculture website.

Further reading

Bentley, J., Van Mele, P. and Harun-ar-Rashid 2013. The Story of a Video on Mechanical Seeders in Bangladesh: “If we are convinced, we will buy it”. MEAS Case Study # 6, Michigan State University, pp. 28.

Bentley, J., Van Mele, P., Harun-ar-Rashid and Krupnik, T. 2015. Distributing and showing farmer learning videos in Bangladesh. The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension, 1-19. Read paper

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