Rising Voices

The Kwa Mashu Community Advancement Project (K-CAP), outside of Durban, South Africa, will be training 15 to 20 youth from their township in the upcoming months to become citizen journalists reporting on local health issues, particularly those related to HIV/AIDS. Through sharing their own stories, the youth K-CAP train will gain new technical skills, while hopefully helping to counter the severe stigma associated with HIV/AIDS and lower HIV rates in Kwa Mashu.

Remember Suso? The plights of the garbage collector in San Javier La Loma in Medellín was brought to the community’s attention by the citizen journalists of the Rising Voices grantee in Colombia. Now he lives in a new house built by the community. Read about this and more updates.

Voces Bolivianas project started citizen media workshops in the city of El Alto in Bolivia in September 2007. Since then its blog outreach workshops spread out and covered almost two third of the country and had a lot of success. Through use of blogs many people of Bolivia, especially some of the indigenous population now have their voices to tell their stories to the world and fight discrimination.

The words “Nari Jibon” should be familiar to regular Rising Voices readers. The Dhaka-based project which has integrated blogging and citizen media into its English and computer classes has been covered frequently on Rising Voices in the past. In this video, we hear directly from the students and staff to get to know the individuals behind the blogs.

Creative Commons licenses enable you to share your creative works with others and retain their commercial value as well. In this post we will discuss why the culture of sharing is important and ways to use cc-licensed contents.

Many of the same Calcutta-based youth who were trained as citizen journalists in the Neighbourhood Diaries project are also featured in the most recent issue of Kalam’s annual anthology of poetry, “Open Box“, which as been made available here as an eBook.

In the city of Câmpulung Moldovenesc, in North Eastern Romania, the Orizonturi Foundation will be creating a Blogging Club in the upcoming months in hopes of changing their community’s perceptions of those with mental health problems. Their project, “Blogging the Dream,” is one of the six new health-focused citizen media outreach projects that were announced in June by Rising Voices and Open Society Institute’s Health Media Initiative.

We have some updates from the Rising Voices grantee REPACTED. In the last week of July REPACTED had a workshop on report writing and blogging in their project office in Nakuru, Kenya.

Neighbourhood Diaries, a pilot project of the local NGO Kalam, is training marginalized youth in Calcutta’s working class neighborhoods how to become citizen journalists. Through their poems and interviews we discover both the depressing and the delicious in Calcutta’s Bowbazar neighbourhood.

In this post we will experience Bangladesh through the eyes of Nari Jibon bloggers, learn more about some of the people behind Nari Jibon and learn how the project is making a difference with its blogging activities.