There is a general appreciation around the importance of listening to communities, incorporating community inputs, and ensuring their participation in designing, implementing and monitoring development programs. However, most often, design efforts, implementation models and even investment plans do not consider or include resources or efforts required to create and nurture inclusive conversation spaces, capacity building of communities, required to harness the power of community voices. It is mostly reduced to superficial actions like including citizen anecdotal quotes, stories or token interviews. Citizen or community voices provide much more than just quantitative or directional insights. They carry forth critical aspects that reflect context-from a socio-cultural-economic-ecological perspective, emotion, often reflecting the depth and scale of the issue and intersectional nuances that can only be reflected and captured through the lived experiences and voices of citizens.
Gram Vaani has been operating for years, building and managing community-led ‘Digital Commons’ or community-based conversation spaces. It was inspiring to see how closely Gram Vaani’s model aligns with Apurva.ai’s ‘Listen, Learn, Act’ framework and bottom-up approach to achieve ecosystem effectiveness. This recognizes the importance of community voices and the opportunity to utilize AI-based sense-making capabilities to amplify these voices, refine program design, share lessons and knowledge among grassroots organizations, and positively influence funding strategies and policy interventions.
Gram Vaani has been working with a network of partners across domains, including Health, Agriculture, Governance, Social Schemes & Entitlements, Education, Youth, Gender, Climate, helping them leverage our voice-based community engagement platforms, led by our community changemakers & entrepreneurs, to drive sustainable change. Gram Vaani’s scale and time-tested voice tech platform & capabilities have helped hundreds of partners reach and engage with millions of users, providing access to credible & contextual information, driving conversations and generating insights. Partner-collaborated programs, anchored by Gram Vaani, generate valuable user and community voices in the form of perspectives, opinions, queries, grievances, etc., as ground truth that help partners recalibrate their program implementation strategies and impact evaluation efforts. Gram Vaani is working towards leveraging and strategically integrating the sense-making capabilities and features offered by Apurva.ai, enhancing the value proposition for partner programs across themes. We see an exciting opportunity to deepen this engagement and scale this proposition.