Free/Dem - short for FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY - is a Digital and Media Literacy movement with and by marginalized communities to reclaim online media spaces.
Research reveals a huge digital gender divide across South Asia, with women nearly 50% less likely to have access to mobile internet than men. The Free/Dem initiative addresses this by engaging with women and girls from the most disenfranchised communities on issues around digital and media literacy.
Under the Free/Dem initiative, community members sign up for a digital and media literacy training series that teaches them about the Internet, smart phones, gender, media - and the role of media in a democracy. They discuss ideas around freedom of expression, right to voice, data privacy and surveillance. They also learn to navigate the internet and use smartphones to create audio and video content, in order to create simple digital stories. The training also equips them to parse news and information, identify fake news and fact check information.
Free/Dem trainees run a WhatsApp Radio channel, a hyperlocal community channel with over 1000 local subscribers including local stakeholders and local government authorities. Community trainees - mostly women and girls - are today actively producing podcast series titled "Women Who Talk Too Much” and "Free to Speak”. (Listen to these podcasts here: http://podcast.ideosyncmedia.org)
During the COVID pandemic the Free/Dem trainees created a digital help desk at the local community center in their area to help community members sign up for emegency assistance being offered by the Delhi government. They also produced a series of Corona Special podcasts looking at how the pandemic impacted women and girls' lives. These included narratives of abuse and violence, health and sanitation concerns, loss of livelihood and emotional trauma, and the lack of educational opportunities. (Listen to the corona special podcast here http://bit.ly/3sNB9lB).
See a short film about the initiative here: https://vimeo.com/507040890

http://www.freedem.in

• Urban slum areas of NCR of Delhi, India

• Youth
• Women
• Migrants
• Refugees and internally displaced people

The initiative shows strong possibilities for replicability: Based on the training modules and curricula that have been evolved over the first two years of training, we are currently in the process of formally compiling the training structure and materials as a module that can be shared with other civil society organizations and communities. The draft version of the compiled module is currently being tested with young girls and youth in the rural areas of three States of India (Rajasthan, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, along with an added module on leadership development. This testing phase is likely to be completed by mid-2021, after which the finalized and refined training module will become publicly available - and we will also begin conducting Training of Trainers processes in order to assist in the creation of a pool of community trainers who can implement the module independently with other marginalized communities across India and South Asia.

Between 2002 and 2014, Ideosync Media Combine was deeply involved in advocacy for the Indian community media sector, as well as capacity building for the fledgling local radio stations that were set up under the Community Radio policy. However, spectrum availability in urban Indian cities is minimal, and therefore marginalized communities in urban areas did not have access to their own stations. The experience and learnings from this process, informed by our research on how the digital divide disproportionately impacted women and girls were what drove us to explore the Free/Dem Media Paathshaalas as a way to address both the lack of media access and the gender imbalance in access to new ICTs and the internet.

1. We believe the sustainability of the initiative is endorsed by the fact that Ideosync began this process by investing its own resources, time and available funds and equipment in late 2017. Within 6 months, the initiative had gathered enough attention, and was showing enough promise to find support from two key donor agencies, who have helped expand the programme and deepen it.: WACC and the Ford Foundation.

2. Additionally, within two years, the programme has expanded in partnership with three more grassroots organizations across Northern India (Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), to reach out to new groups of women and girls in those areas. Ideosync and the Free/Dem initiative have not had to support the cost of these additional trainings, which have been organized and supported by the local partners. Ideosync has only had to share its modules and its trainers' time for the initial trainings.

3. Finally, the initiative has now been successful in creating a cohort of trained women and girls who have now become local community mobilizers and trainers within their communities, and are now beginning to train new entrants to the programme in order to create an expanding spiral of skills, capacity and empowerment within these spaces.

The project addresses the gender digital gap and is designed in partnership with women and girls from marginalized urban areas. It holds freedom of expression and the right to communication at the center of its participatory design. Through the creation of access to new ICTs, and capacity building for the creation and sharing of knowledge in the digital world, FREE/DEM works towards creating voice parity. The learning curriculum is specifically designed for first time users of technology and the smartphone. This enables these new users to become equal contributors to national dialogue on social change by equipping them with skills to not just navigate the internet and seek information, but create media through podcasts, digital stories, photos and videos. Additionally, there is an environment of fear that creates self-censorship, particularly amongst the most vulnerable. This initiative strengthens the understanding around the right to freedom of expression and the constitutionally guaranteed right to information, thereby enabling women, girls and youth to feel confident about expressing themselves online, and giving voice to their lived realities and their narratives.