Audiopedia - An Open Ecosystem of Localized Digital Audio Contents and Technologies for SBCC Campaigns

Summary

Health and nutrition education programmes tend to engage women, because of their perceived traditional roles as primary care givers. Yet, 500 million women worldwide are illiterate. There is a strong need for a robust and scalable approach which does not rely on the written word to provide knowledge to marginalized populations. Audiopedia is tackling this challenge. Audiopedia is a global online project combining relevant and localized SBCC audio contents with easily usable hard- and software. The web site Audiopedia.io was designed to provide access to open knowledge to both CBOs/NGOs and individuals. CBOs/NGOs can benefit by using it as part of their SBCC strategy, as it enables them to search, download, embed and share audio files in several languages. Audiopedia does also provide several technological solutions to make contents accessible to both literate and illiterate audiences. Solar powered audio players have been used to provide health education in several projects in East and Western Africa. Mobile web applications in combination with adhoc Wifi networks can stream Audiopedia contents without the need of any internet connection and independently from the electric grid. Audiopedia was designed as an open ecosystem, allowing CBOs and NGOs to include their own audio contents, which can be communicated using QR codes or Audiopedia's own link shortening service "mp3.fyi". The goal of Audiopedia is to promote and ease the use of digital audio in SBCC campaigns by providing a coherent infrastructure of contents, technologies and case studies. The community platform Audiopedia.org reflects this claim.

Background/Objectives

Hundreds of millions of women and girls are denied their right to education, effectively preventing their empowerment. In fact, the number of illiterate women worldwide has not decreased in the last thirty years. Access to knowledge and information is a basic human right. It is intrinsically linked to the realization of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women and Girls. The goal of Audiopedia is to provide audible knowledge to literally every rural woman in the world. No matter where she lives, what language she speaks or whether she can read or not.

Results/Lessons Learned

Common listening to audio contents is an excellent way to enhance discussion and exchange of experiences in groups. This fosters successful learning and activates internal resources in participants as well as self-help group mechanisms. Dissemination of audio contents both to single listeners and big audiences can be realised in many easy, flexible and economic ways. It is easily possible to integrate local expert knowledge in the online database, thus making it available for other NGOs and creating valuable synergy effects. Even in countries with reasonable official literacy rates the ancient oral tradition of preserving and transmitting knowledge is still dominant. To stick to this tradition makes learning easier for many people and considerably increases the acceptance of the learning contents. Over 3,116 living languages are unwritten. Audio contents are the only way to successfully disseminate information to people speaking these languages.

Discussion/Implications For The Field

From the very first moment, Audiopedia has been a crowd impact project in many respects. This does not only refer to the crowd translation effort realised on the corresponding online platform. It also means that the expertise and creativity of local NGOs in finding new and innovative ways of using the audio contents in the field are invaluable. Therefore, information flow is not and should never be just one way. Continuous user feedback on the community website (audiopedia.org) about Audiopedia field project implementations is vital both to inspire other NGOs and to allow a real continuous improvement of the concept.

Abstract submitted by:

Marcel Heyne - URIDU