About 11% of the population of Bangladesh consists of minorities, who face discrimination due to their religion, ethnicity, gender identity, and geographical location-based differences. Discrimination persists in the above groups on access to education, healthcare, housing, employment, and legal support.

To empower these communities and improve their involvement in the development process, Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication (BNNRC) implemented a consortium project titled Empowering Left Behind Minority Communities to Effectively Participate in the development process of Bangladesh (ELMC).

The overall objective of this project is – to empower local minority rights CSOs and networks in Bangladesh to effectively engage with left-behind communities and enable their participation in the local governance & development process.

Under these initiatives, BNNRC has been supporting community radios to develop radio content like -News, Community opinion, Radio Spots/ Drama, Community Service Announcement (CSA) or Public Service Announcement (PSA), Expert Interviews, Case stories, live discussion/phone in, and fellowship program for youth and youth women considering the local issues and using local dialect so that the community can easily understand the messages. The programs are designed in consultation with and engage the left-behind community people. The issues are Recognition as Individuals, Ensure of health services, Education, Employment and Decent work opportunities, Property Rights, etc.

The radio programs both community radios and its Facebook Page created an opportunity to link all stakeholders- Dalit, Plain Land Ethnic Minorities, Transgender & Hijra communities, and their rights National ‘Leave no one behind’ CSOs, and different Govt. departments at the community level.
This project aims to directly reach more than 6 lakh people from marginalized communities and indirectly reach more than 18 lakh people additionally.

https://bnnrc.net/category-14-c8-ict-applications-connecting-voicing-and-empowering-disadvantaged-communities-through-community-broadcasting/

• Bangladesh

• Remote and rural communities
• minority communities

Empowering left-behind minority communities through Community Radios in Bangladesh is a community-based on-demand project. The project has been implemented through the engagement of left-behind minority communities like Dalit, Plain Land Ethnic Minorities, Transgender & Hijra communities, Tea Workers, Persons with disabilities (PWD), other listeners, local media, social media users, Govt. officials and community media broadcasters for developing and broadcasting radio episodes. So, the project is replicable all over the world where Radio waves and Social Media (SM) are available and functioning.

In this era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and rapid change of global context, Radio programs, and social media content becomes a tool to reach wider audiences for building awareness of the left-behind minority community’s effective participation in the development process towards reducing inequalities of the society. Hence Community Radio can play a vital role to make people aware to minimize discrimination in society and cope with the competitive global challenges collectively. As the radio and social media are the most popular media, cheaper, portable, and easy to access so with the contribution of the community the program could be run to remove the social barriers and stigma.

Through this intervention, WSIS values (Action line- C8) in Bangladeshi communities are strongly adhered to and promoted extensively. This is done through promoting cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity, and local content of the left-behind minority community to raise awareness of their rights.