Gender Inclusion

Inequality perpetuates poverty, and gender inequality is one of the most pervasive forms. Since our founding, Digital Green has actively promoted strategies that build women’s agency and promote the effective partnership of women and men to improve their family’s incomes and overall wellbeing. Gender responsive programming is key to the success of our projects. Women contribute up to 80 percent in food production by way of rearing poultry, livestock as well as growing crops.

Our Approach

We make sure to feature women as prominently as the male counterparts in our videos, so as to challenge gender stereotypes and reinforce women as valuable contributors on the farm. Additionally, our video content models healthy intra-household decision-making to showcase equitable partnership between spouses. We design our solutions for women – so that it is not designed only for men. Globally, women are 8% less likely to own a phone and 20% less likely to own a smartphone. Literacy gaps also remain a challenge. In India, male literacy rate is 75% and female literacy rate is 53%. This demands a voice and video first approach for improved outreach. Our technology-enabled solutions and institutional partnerships help in addressing barriers to women’s participation in extension services and supports them in taking up leadership positions in the communities where we work.

Samvad: Digital Community Engagement Platforms for Improving Family Planning, Maternal Child Health and Nutrition Outcomes

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Partner Organizations

Centre for Youth and Social Developmen (CYSD)

2015 – 2021

Project Samvad, is a USAID-funded project aimed at addressing Family Planning, Maternal Child Health and Nutrition goals.

Digital Green collaborates with existing health system structures — including India’s State Rural Livelihood Missions and state-level agencies of the National Health Mission, as well as other local organizations trusted and active in the target districts – to build their capacity to employ video- and other ICT-enabled approaches to increase adoption of optimal maternal, infant and child health and nutrition and family planning practices. The project has directly reached 544,000 women in five states (Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand) through facilitated community videos. We have incorporated a range of ICT solutions and mass media and mid-media platforms to complement and supplement video messages, including radio and village campaigns; focused mobile-based messaging on key thematic topics; calls with targeted, life-stage

specific messages in the 1000 days period; and use of technology to improve interpersonal counselling by frontline workers. These platforms have reached 1.9 million individuals. Use of data collection and analysis tools has helped our partners to better reach the target audiences. We maximize impact by linking demand generation with public supply-side interventions.

Upscaling Participatory Action and Videos for Agriculture and Nutrition (UPAVAN)

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Partner Organizations

2015 – 2021

Maternal and child undernutrition is one of the world’s most serious health, economic and human development challenges. Child undernutrition causes an estimated 3.1 million child deaths annually, and one-third of women in South Asia are underweight. Maternal and child undernutrition have important consequences for pregnancy outcomes, children’s survival, child physical and cognitive development, and the incidence of acute and chronic diseases. The impacts of undernutrition also extend beyond health outcomes, with consequences for educational attainment, economic progress, and human wellbeing. There is an increasing scientific consensus that interventions to address immediate determinants of undernutrition (‘nutrition-specific’ interventions) are necessary but not sufficient: acceleration of progress in maternal and child nutrition will entail coupling these interventions with nutrition-sensitive programs that tackle the underlying causes of undernutrition. ‘Making agriculture work for nutrition’ is now a top policy priority but the evidence-base is weak, largely due to poorly designed studies that are unable to discern causal effects.

Upscaling Participatory Action and Videos for Agriculture and Nutrition (UPAVAN) is a four-arm, cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) based in Keonjhar district, Odisha, India, aimed at assessing the nutrition and agricultural impact and cost-effectiveness of three types of interventions (compared with a control arm). The RCT has been designed and managed by LSHTM in partnership with Digital Green who takes care of the implementation side of it in partnership with implementing partners. The three intervention arms are built on a set of pilot and feasibility studies (and a current intervention strengthening grant). The control arm (Arm 4) receives standard agriculture, health and nutrition-related services provided by the government or other organizations in Odisha, India.

Voluntary Association for Rural Reconstruction and Appropriate Technology (VARRAT) is the primary implementing partner responsible for on-the-ground implementation, facilitating partner review meetings, and monitoring activities in collaboration with Digital Green and Ekjut. JSI Research and Training Institute (JSI) is the primary technical partner responsible for the design and execution of formative research and development of training materials on NSA and MIYCN topics. JSI participated in a joint review of the operational protocol and implementation documents, prioritizing themes for video production, and strengthening VARRAT’s capacity to develop specific recommended practices (called the package of practices or PoPs) and video storyboards for each topic. Ekjut is responsible for the PLA cycle of meetings in Arm 3, including designing and developing materials, building the capacity of the community-level agents who implement the PLA cycle, providing supportive supervision, and monitoring the process.

Web-Based Training Application for Community Knowledge Workers

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Partner Organizations

2015 – 2020

Using a web-based learning and assessment platform, we train farmers as community knowledge workers (CKWs) primarily women, enabling them to educate farmers on practices to boost their productivity and nutrition behaviors. This education takes place through videos produced by farmers and for farmers; the CKWs disseminate the videos to other farmers would stand to benefit from this knowledge. Our training courseware, made possible by funding from Oracle, includes both offline and online components, using a combination of practical instructional videos and a mobile training application that guides trainers and assesses the mastery level of CKWs.

Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Intervention to Promote Maternal & Child Health

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Partner Organizations

2014 – 2016

Following a successful pilot with Strengthening Partnerships, Research, and Innovations in Nutrition (SPRING) to adapt Digital Green’s approach to promote maternal, infant, and young child nutrition (MIYCN) behaviors and practices in 2013, the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council Grand Challenges (BIRAC) funded a subsequent project to build on lessons learned through IFPRI’s evaluation of the initial pilot. The BIRAC-supported project explored how the Digital Green / SPRING approach could be modified to increase adoption of MIYCN recommended practices.

We partnered with the Voluntary Association for Rural Reconstruction and Appropriate Technology (VARRAT) to implement the project in the same region–working with 112 women’s self-help groups in 30 villages across Odisha. We also worked with Ekjut, a civil society organization, to design a structured participatory learning and action (PLA)

approach to engage the women in the information being disseminated. Through a randomized controlled trial, we tested both Digital Green’s existing approach and the newly designed PLA approach, and found that participants in both groups demonstrated significant increases in nutrition knowledge. This study led to the design and funding of a four-year, three arm, cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess the impact and cost-effectiveness of the program approaches piloted in the BIRAC project on agricultural and nutrition outcomes.

Community-Led Video Approach to Promote Maternal, Infant & Young Child Nutrition

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Partner Organizations

2012 -2013

In 2012, the USAID-funded Strengthening Partnerships, Results, and Innovations in Nutrition Globally (SPRING) project launched a collaboration with Digital Green and the Voluntary Association for Rural Reconstruction and Appropriate Technology (VARRAT) to assess whether Digital Green’s approach–which had been focused on adoption of agricultural practices–could be adapted to promote maternal, infant, and young child nutrition (MIYCN) behaviors and practices.

Digital Green worked with SPRING and VARRAT to implement a 12-month pilot across 30 villages in Odisha, which sought to develop local NGO capacity in MIYCN and to produce and disseminate 10 videos featuring MIYCN practices. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted a study to examine the feasibility of using the new Digital Green/SPRING approach to promote adoption of MIYCN behaviors during the course of the pilot. The study found that the approach was highly promising, as the videos proved to be one of the key sources of nutrition-related information within the communities, and demand for them was high among the project’s target audience (women in self-help groups) and frontline workers. The full report can be access here . The results of the pilot and feasibility study led to a subsequent project in Odisha to advance IFPRI’s recommendations, and later inspired additional SPRING / Digital Green collaborations in additional geographies. The full report of the pilot and feasibility study can be found here.