The Tansen Community Multimedia Centre (CMC) initiative in Nepal is part of a regional innovation and research project initiated by UNESCO to study the potential of information and communi-cation technologies (ICTs) for poverty reduction. The project is looking for ways to use ICTs as a tool to empower and strengthen the voices of the poor.

Community multimedia centres are an extension of UNESCO’s long-standing work with community radio, inspired by the increasingly important role played by new digital technologies. CMCs like the one in Tansen combine traditional community media - in Tansen’s case video, cable TV and print - with new media tools like computers and Internet.

The goal is to explore ways that Tansen can use ICT as dynamic development tool: to bring more voices and cultural forms, ideas and issues into the community’s media space, and to provide poor, marginalised youth with new skills and opportunities.

The combination of established local media, like community TV with new technologies like Internet, opens up great possibilities to link small, comparatively inaccessible towns and villages like Tansen to new global networks. New media are not only powerful tools for producing content, they are also gateways to ever expanding information and knowledge resources.


Life in the hills
Tansen is a hill town some 300 kms by road, west of Kathmandu. Once the seat of the Sen Dynasty, it is now the headquarters of Palpa district in western Nepal. Perched on the rim of a fertile valley, Tansen is about 30 kms into the Himalayan foothills and 60 kms from Nepal’s border with India.

The population of the Tansen municipality is about 25,000, made up of a mix of ethnic communities and traditional caste groupings. Like the rest of Nepal and much of South Asia, a majority of the population are youth below the age of 18 years. The townspeople are predominantly Newar Buddhists and Brahmin and Magar Hindus. Though officially a thing of the past, traditional caste, trade and ethnic groupings are still a very strong part of Tansen’s social fabric.

Historically a regional centre, like many hill towns in the Himalayan belt, Tansen is increasingly isolated from the plains where growth, trade and mobility are higher. Palpa also faces the pressures of migrating labour and instability due to ongoing conflict between Nepal’s government and Maoist insurgents. There are few local jobs or business opportunities through which young people can hope to make a decent living and the situation is worse for the poor, women and people from marginalised castes.

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