Media Kit

It would probably be like the chicken and egg story. In many cases interventions seem to disappear after receiving awards. But in some cases awards give the much needed boost to ICT interventions to get the right exposure and reach to be recognized and taken up by industry champions.

Sisu Samrakshak?s (SSK) success has been that the World Summit Award has catapulted it from a donor based intervention to a national ICT health package being implemented in multiple languages across India.

Sisu Samrakshak (Child Protector), a portal developed by the Hyderabad office of UNICEF India for imparting knowledge on healthcare to rural communities, received the Manthan Award in 2005, the national WSA contest for India, and in the same year also won in the e-Health category at the World Summit Award in Tunis. SSK has been recognized for its content and its uniqueness as an ICT intervention in reaching out to an illiterate population with the potential to cut across the barriers of language.

The slow progress of human development indictors among the rural populace, especially with regard to health and nutrition is one of the major developmental challenges in India.

SSK was conceptualized to utilize ICTs in favour of an illiterate population to bring in desired knowledge about health care which should lead to appropriate behaviour changes and utilization of services. The concept that guided SSK was that when integrated with government programmes, ICTs can be used to help achieve multi-sectoral development goals.

Using touch screens, pictorial and audio interface, SSK aims to: i) provide a single window tailored to low-literate and poor rural populations to access information on a range of themes related to human development, including child health, development, nutrition; maternal care; HIV/AIDS prevention; and safe water supply and sanitation; ii) serve as an alternate or supplementary source of information wherein government front line functionaries often fail to reach out; iii) equip frontline development workers with information to enhance ability to accurately convey development messages and facilitate desired behaviour change; iv) augment current programmes supported by the state governments and; v) accelerate achievement of goals pertaining to children?s and women?s development.

After the media exposure on receiving the World Summit Award, UNICEF saw fit to expand the information available on health to also include a package on HIV/aids for women and young people giving prevention as well as information on managing with HIV/Aids.

NASSCOM Foundation, which is a CSR program by the consortium of national software companies of India, approached UNICEF to take it to the national level through its Rural Knowledge Network of over 100 kiosks being implemented in regional states. The MOU has enabled NASSCOM Foundation to further tweak SSK in additional regional languages like Marathi and conversion in six other regional languages is under production. SSK will continue to give essential information on health, hygiene, sanitation and HIV aids to more and more rural communities as it replicates in multiple languages in India.