National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR) in collaboration with UNICEF, Hyderabad Field Office, is training over 28.33 lakh community leaders through online programs to practice social behaviors required to control the transmission of COVID-19 cases in villages.
NIRDPR's Communication Resource Unit (CRU) and UNICEF are working closely with the state governments of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in preparedness and responses to contain the pandemic.
This initiative, under the leadership of Dr Gyanmudra, Director, Communication Resource Unit, and Head, Centre for Good Governance and Policy Analysis (CGG&PA), NIRDPR, is a joint collaboration between NIRDPR and UNICEF's preventive measures and reaches out to key stakeholders in rural communities.
The online training program was initiated along the lines of a detailed Risk Communication Plan to build capacities of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI), Self-help Groups (SHG), National Service Scheme (NSS) officials volunteers and Community Radio Stations (CRS) on the role that they can play in preventing the spread of COVID-19 in their groups and village communities.
Speaking about the impact of this initiative, Dr WR Reddy IAS, Director General, NIRDPR, said, "We recognized the exceptional role that Leaders of Panchayati Raj Institutions and village organizations in dealing with the crisis of COVID19 by disseminating reliable information. Hence, we decided to build their capacities by endowing them with facts about COVID19, common symptoms, modes of transmission and key behaviours, among other things."
The Communication Resource Unit (CRU) of NIRDPR and UNICEF, Hyderabad field office developed and shared relevant materials such as Handouts, Posters, FAQs and Audio-visual documents with all trainees in order to be circulated in their respective rural communities.
Highlighting the response to this initiative, Dr Gyanmudra said, "The response from the States and participants has been very encouraging. The participants are in turn communicating the messages further down to the Panchayat level. In most of the training programmes, which extends to about two hours over video conference calls."
A total of 28,33,744 key stakeholders from Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have been briefed on the key practices to adopt to prevent the spread of Coronavirus in village communities and groups.
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