Panos Institute South Asia
Panos South Asia has its headquarters in Kathmandu (Nepal) with country offices in New Delhi (India), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Karachi (Pakistan), and Dhaka (Bangladesh). The regional office in Kathmandu was established in 1997,the India office in 2000, the Sri Lanka office & the Pakistan office in 2004.The Bangladesh office opened in 2005 as also the North-East project office in Guwahati. We moved south to Chennai in July 2006, to establish our Globalisation Project office.Recent developments include the addition of new programme staff and the creation of a state-of-the-art media centre in Kathmandu.
The multiple roles of the regional centre are:
- To work in partnership with both local and regional partner organisations to stimulate and inform public and policy debate, and to provide information on key environment and development issues that is accessible to multiple target groups.
- To encourage and help develop traditional or innovative information, communications, activities and techniques, to enable marginalised groups and communities to play an increasingly greater role in development debates (for instance recording testimonies of indigenous people displaced by coal mining in Jharkhand or those of women and children affected and infected by HIV/AIDS).
- To utilise issue-based training workshops to promote and build greater capacity in investigative reporting in the region.
- To engage in research that enables us to influence the building of capacity to deal with constantly evolving opportunities and threats arising from new communication technologies. This is especially true with regard to our activities on radio programming and technology to effectively use this communication tool.
- To implement activities to increase the quality of, and capacity for, a continuing regional analysis of information and communications issues.
- To serve as a Southern communication nodal point which acts as a link to the Northern media, ensuring that voices in the South have a greater reach.
