Voice of South

Voice of South (VOS) is an online platform for South Asian community development. Basically, this online platform will focus the community with the development issues, problems, success stories and case studies. We want to disseminate & share these information among the South Asian journalists, civil societies, development stake holders and policy makers. So that they can mobilize the voices of South Asian Communities. We want to make a digital bridge between the rural communities and development initiators. Moreover, information disseminating by us will help rural communities to know each other and help each other. This interaction will also help them to replicate best practices of development.

Voice of South will be a platform where citizen journalism and blogging from development workers will get priority. So, there is an opportunity to know the status of community from them. Voice of South wants to establish a chain to collect information. VOS members will visit the rural areas to know the reality and VOS web portal will be the platform to disseminate those realities. Besides these VOS members always observe mainstream media. So, sometimes we may collect the rural development stories from mainstream media also. We are getting good response from our online discussion group (Link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/voice-of-south) where more than eight hundred South Asian journalists, civil society members, stake holders, development workers and policy makers are listed. We believe this group will be a good source to generate content for Voice of South web portal.

VOS also wants to work on specific assignment. Development organizations or Donor agencies can assign VOS to find out the real situation of a specific community or zone. We will love to do these types of work.

Md. Arafatul Islam, a young Journalist form Bangladesh, is the Founder and Moderator of Voice of South. He is familiar with new web publishing technologies. In June, 07 he has won citizen journalism award called “Off-the-Radar Contest” from International citizen journalism website GroundReport.com. He has participated an International training on online journalism and Web publishing organized by Panos last year. He is also a Panos south Asia fellow to work on Poverty Reduction Strategies. Besides these, he has prior experience to work in citizen media out reach.  To know more about Voice of South, please feel free to send e-mail at voice_of_south@yahoo.com . Beside this, we will  appreciate, if you fill up the comment box below for any queries: