Raising the profile of women's health rights and needs
The goal of the Support to Safe Motherhood Programme (SSMP) is to improve maternal and newborn health and survival especially for poor and excluded groups. This special focus is crucial in a country like Nepal, where there are wide disparities between different sectors of society
In order to reach and serve the poor and excluded in Nepal, SSMP works with ActionAid Nepal to implement an Equity and Access Programme (EAP), which engages at the community level to raise awareness of maternal and newborn health services and rights. The EAP programme also works to capture the ‘voices’ of community members to advocate for safe motherhood as the right of all women, and to more broadly influence government policy and action in favour of the poor and excluded.
In 2008, SSMP and ActionAid worked together to produce a participatory video called ‘Women’s Voices’ in order to raise the profile of women’s health rights and needs, by using women’s personal experiences and testimonies. The film places women as powerful and high profile advocates for change.
Women’s Voices was made with the participation of women from the Chitwan district of Nepal. It follows a research project in which some of these women were trained to collect stories of their peer’s experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and maternal health services. The women and their peers were trained in camera skills to enable them to capture some of these stories on film and interview healthcare professionals about issues relating to their experiences.
Participatory Video films differ in style and content from standard documentary films. Documentary films are the authored products of the film maker, who maintains control of the film’s content and direction. Participatory Video, however, enables the film’s subjects to make their own film in which they shape issues according to their own sense of what is important. They also control how they will be represented in the film.
As such, the participatory approach of Women’s Voices offers a valuable and moving insight into the experiences of women living in rural Nepal, as told and captured by the women themselves. The film capitalises on the power and authenticity of the women’s experiences (their ‘voice’) in an accessible and engaging format for a wide audience. It is an important and powerful advocacy tool for improved safe motherhood and newborn health in Nepal.
