‘I have been working at Radio Sagarmata for two years. One day, our station manager approached the team and told us about an NGO called Oxfam who wanted to fund a programme on gender issues. He wanted to know who amongst us wished to take it on. I didn’t know anything about gender but I was extremely keen to produce my own show. I was the only person who raised my hand, so they let me do it.

At that time, all of my knowledge of gender issues came from a single chapter in one of my sociology textbooks from university. But I was keen to learn more. I had long discussions with the Oxfam team and their allies and together we planned the format for the programme. And so Saha-Astittwa was born.

The name means ‘co-existence’, and this is the focus of the programme. Saha-Astittwa airs every Saturday between 9.15 and 10 in the morning. It starts off with playing a song – always one that is not demeaning to women. Then it covers all the week’s news items related to women. After that a real life story is presented and discussed. We always relate the story to policy and have a discussion around it. Sometimes we ring up policy makers and ask them why they are not doing more for women.

Saha-Astittwa finishes at 10 am. By the time I move out of the studio and head back downstairs to my desk, the phones are already ringing frantically. Lots of people call in to discuss the programme. We have one listener in Bakhtapur who calls in frequently. He is married and is in his late ‘twenties. Before the programme started, he says didn’t know what women’s rights were. Now he feels that he has been sensitised to respect his wife and take responsibility for the housework together with her.

For a while we aired a five-minute module called ‘model male’. Every week we would acknowledge a male listener who shares the responsibility for household work or for the children. We got an overwhelming response to this segment. People would often send us poems, letters and songs. We read out many of them in the programme. In the letters, people often talked about how listening to the programme changed them and how it changed the way they treat others.

We are currently planning listeners’ clubs. The idea is to form groups of around ten people who listen to the programme together, discuss the issues and encourage others to listen too.

A while ago I personally became involved in the ‘We Can’ campaign. Now I am going to encourage the members of the listeners’ clubs to become Change Makers and join the ‘We Can’ campaign to end violence against women.

Once a year we go out of the valley to collect people’s testimonies and conduct a live programme, and once a month we also have a call-in programme. This kind of reporting is particularly useful as it gathers and reflects people’s opinions. In Nepal, we get cheap radios from China and this means that even people who don’t have a lot of money can listen. Radio is a great way to reach a lot of people and influence people’s ideas. And what is more important is that people can listen to the radio while they are doing other things.”