Nalamdana - street theater for education in Tamilnadu

: India’s population recently surpassed one billion. Of this large populace, half of all children under five suffer from malnutrition, half of all adults are illiterate and half of all death is still caused by wholly preventable infectious diseases. Where does one begin to effect positive change? At Nalamdana, a small non-profit, this is our daily topic of discussion. We are one of numerous small NGO efforts in the country. The collective resources of NGOs are less than 5% of the government budget. Can we really make a difference? At Nalamdana we believe we can.

Nalamdana volunteers take the learning process on-stage.

Nalamdana, which in Tamil means “are you feeling well?”, is based in Chennai. The group is founded on the fundamental belief that to be an effective organization we need broad participation - no one person can be as effective as a collective people. The problems we are trying to solve are perhaps the most complex in the world and need both dedication and analytical thinking - compassion alone is insufficient. Therefore people must be compensated fairly for their work to ensure that the best minds are applied to these issues.

Established in December 1993 with a seed grant from the Echoing Green Foundation, Nalamdana began as a small group of dedicated, talented, college educated youth carrying preventive health messages to the urban slums and rural areas of Tamil Nadu. Nalamdana uses creative techniques such as street theater, film and music in popular styles to communicate its messages. In order to bring in broader participation and be part of the people we target rather than separate from them, Nalamdana began to build its staff from the very communities it targets. Our staff and volunteers include former autorikshaw drivers, electricians, rehabilitated sex workers and coolie laborers, drawn to Nalamdana for both its cause and the popular appeal of the education techniques. The breadth of perspectives and skills that we have established in Nalamdana is our biggest strength.

We have spent the last five years developing effective message strategies for preventive health, reaching out to people with these messages and establishing a rapport with the communities we target. But have we made an impact? Perhaps a small one, but our challenge is large and we recognize that we are only now at the very beginning. So far we have reached close to 500,000 people through street theater with our health messages and millions more through T.V. films. Street theater, due to its interactive nature, has proven most effective with up to 60% changes in knowledge after our intervention. Yet we know that we have done little more than create a very basic awareness. We recognize that change in knowledge does not necessarily mean change in behavior. We also recognize that to actually impact the incidence of the mostly infectious diseases we need to reach a critical mass. Yet we have reached hardly 1% of our target audience of 36 million people in Tamil Nadu.

And so, in our plan for the next five years we will draw from our strengths and strive to overcome these shortcomings. Our focus for these next years will be on scientifically establishing an intervention model that is effective in achieving our final goals and developing local leadership to expand the reach of our interventions. We will do this through three major efforts:

Collaborative Research: Here we bring the rigors of academic research to our efforts to answer the questions of what type of message strategy, frequency of message and supporting activities are able to show the most significant long term impact on behavior. We do this through bringing in researchers from various schools of public health, both in India and abroad who will structure their doctoral work around these questions. A local advisory committee in India will guide their field efforts, while their advisor at their home institution helps with developing methodologies. These researchers are funded by external fellowships and grants, making this a cost effective means for Nalamdana to answer these questions and providing the researchers practical relevance for their work.
Leadership Development: We believe that to establish a collective change in behavior we need strong local leadership for the future. We have targeted two groups - youth from the urban slums and women in the rural areas.

In our youth leadership program we select youth from the urban slums, usually in the 8th and 9th grades, that demonstrate academic promise, leadership potential and a strong commitment to social change. We provide these students with financial support for the entire duration of their education as well as a host of out of school activities to empower them to realise their potential as future leaders. Out of school activities include workshops encouraging them to debate social issues, field trips and a mentoring program

In our women’s program we empower women from the rural areas to take active interest in village governance through contesting the panchayat elections. Our efforts involve street plays to encourage women’s participation in the panchayat as well as sessions explaining the logistics of contesting an election to the women interested. We also provide post election workshops to empower the women who achieve these leadership positions to make educated decisions relating to health and education for their village.
Capacity Building: While our leadership development efforts take a more long term approach, in the short-term we need to continue our intervention work and expand our reach. Through this effort we will work with schools and colleges to build youth groups that will take our established interventions to their regions. In the next few years we will work with a few select regions to establish an effective way to do this.

We see our next five years as a learning period where we will build effective methodologies that we can then replicate throughout the state to expand our reach. This is not an easy task. In a funding world where people look for immediate results, a long term approach is not favoured. In the more than five years we have been around, we have often faced financial difficulties of worrying proportions but we have weathered them and we are still here and more motivated than ever to face the challenge.

Tara Thiagarajan

August 1999

Nalamdana - street theater for education in Tamilnadu

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