World’s First Rural Reality Show
on Climate Change
Inspires Green Leaders
For the first time in the world, the Development Alternatives Rural Reality Show on climate change is raising awareness and sparking community action on the part of diverse participant groups including women and youth. The project uses contemporary media technology such as Community Radio and internet-based rural Video Resource Centers for communicating critical environmental issues through educational entertainment to a mass audience of 131 villages in Bundelkhand—India’s most climate-vulnerable region. The central goal of this innovative and indeed unprecedented infotainment campaign has been to enable rural community members to emerge as the agents of their own empowerment for livelihood support and ecological renewal.
The Rural Reality Show, launched in 2010, is responding to this need by catalysing participatory engagement for a promising future through climate change mitigation and adaptation at the grassroots level. The core concept driving the show is an exciting competition among 40 teams of participants trained and guided by experts in implementing strategies for resource conservation, soil enrichment and environmental regeneration. The aim is to bring climate-change adaptation down to earth and give it local flavour and local relevance by offering communities engaging, step-by-step solutions with scalable application potential.
Reality Show team members are trained in activities such as agro-forestry, rainwater harvesting and vermi-composting through expert guidance framed as entertainment. Three winning teams will be chosen during the final round of the show in mid-May of 2012, receiving prizes of capacity building and empowerment support for upscaling efforts in their chosen area of climate change adaptation, as well as a nominal cash amount. Rural Reality Show programming is customised for delivering strong and accessible messages of hope through purposeful and unified action.
The Rural Reality Show is part of a larger awareness campaign that commenced in 2008 called Shubh Kal: a Better Tomorrow. The communication strategy for Shubh Kal’s pilot project was designed with the assistance of R K Swami BBDO, a high-profile social marketing agency. Credible data on climate change and prospective risk scenarios was brought in by the Indian Institute of Meteorology. Shubh Kal won the Innovation Category 2009 World Bank Development Marketplace Award for having brought about large-scale climate change awareness and adaptation through community radio. Its sister project, the Rural Reality Show, is promising to follow suit through yet more remarkable achievements in mobilising change through community empowerment.
Immediate adaptive action on the part of all stakeholders is urgently needed in this semi-arid area where continuous droughts are devastating the lives of 21 million poor and marginalised people. Agriculture, the main source of sustenance in the region, is threatened by climate change. Hunger, indebtedness and high suicide rates necessitate measures designed to address food, water and energy security, as well as to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
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