ShradhaGiriblogs

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the communication and marketing materials the INGOs and other development agencies produce? I have been working in the communication field for the past 9 years and sadly the materials produced do not have a long shelf life. Often times when an organization is awarded a brand new project there is a whole lot of excitement. As the focal communication person I often collaborate with the program team to develop a communication plan for the new project. The budget has been allocated. The target audiences have been defined in the project document and we are all set to go. So we sit with the team and develop a communication plan. All the team members come up with excellent ideas – brochure, short videos, posters, animated videos, programs on FM and TV. These are all great materials to communicate about the project and its progress during and after the implementation. We make plans to spend thousands of dollars and ensure each and every proj...

Why do donors fund projects that they know are going to produce the same results? No real impact. Same lessons learned theories.  The donors like to give money to organizations that are established, have a reputation and can spend the money on time. The organizations bidding for and winning projects have a readymade budget and timeline to spend (in my last post I talked about how communication materials are mostly waste of money and resources). The people involved in the project have strict deadlines and they work hard to implement and meet the project deadlines. In a country like ours where anything can happen anytime excluding the natural disasters that cannot be avoided – well, the projects don’t get the opportunity to stick to the deadline and the budget gets underspent.  What do the projects do with the underspent budget? It’s simple. The recipient organization asks for an extension and the donors happily oblige because no donor wants to take the money bac...

I am so looking forward to this Dasain. It is that time of the year when I visit my maiti (paternal home) and all my lost siblings are under the same roof in the same house that we all grew up in. I usually start the process of booking our tickets a month before and come to think of it only a month left for Dasain holidays. I am super excited to meet my brothers and sisters because we make sure we have lots of fun drinking and eating khasi ko masu which of course is the only thing we literally binge on. One of my brothers loves haryo kerau (fresh green peas) so he is always shopping for it. My older brother is an expert in choosing the best pieces of meat for barbeque. We sit around the table, some chopping meat, while others busy prepping the table and fixing our drinks. My sisters and sisters in laws serve making sure everyone gets the best of everything and suddenly one of my brother’s pass on a nice piece of meat that I like saying "give this to kanchi". You guessed it...

Recently I read an article written by an Indian woman on how she forgot to raise her son well while she paid particular attention to raising her daughter to be an equal citizen. When we talk about gender equality we often focus on girls. How we should raise them - encourage them to fight for their right; admit them to the best schools; never tell them ‘they can’t do it’ and raise their expectations rather too high. I am a mother to a six year old girl and I often cringe every time I tell her – she can do anything if she wants. While we focus too much on raising our girl’s right we forget to pay attention to our sons.  I lived all my life in a boarding school, the first ten years in an all-girls school. Life wasn’t smooth. We felt foreign to the other gender. We giggled and burst out crazy if a boy approached us. We acted nonsensical at times. We didn’t know how or what they were. They were exclusive – all we saw was the other gender – foreign - boys. We lived in our own b...