For close to three decades, Rupantar has used community media, development communication and audiovisual production to strengthen the voice of marginalized and coastal communities in Bangladesh. Since 2016, that mission has extended across a border: as a partner organization under the Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation (NOREC) Bangladesh-Nepal Exchange Programme, Rupantar has worked with AMARC Asia-Pacific, the regional chapter of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, to exchange professional community radio personnel between the two countries, with the support of the Government of Norway.
The NOREC Bangladesh-Nepal Exchange Programme brought together two partner organizations working in community radio: Rupantar in Bangladesh and AMARC Asia-Pacific in Nepal. Established in 2016, the partnership has been renewed more than once, in direct recognition of the results achieved in earlier rounds, a track record set out in full under Achievements below.
Its overarching objective has been to promote public health facilities as a human right through community radio in both countries, pursued through three interlinked thematic pillars.
Building the capacity of local stakeholder groups in health education and health communication through participatory approaches, and widening access to services such as vaccination through better community knowledge.
Using community radio as a tool for open, distance-based community learning, reaching audiences who would not otherwise access structured educational content.
Strengthening the professional and production skills of community radio personnel themselves: the direct, personal outcome of the exchange model.
Within this framework, the programme has also worked to build community awareness and confidence to demand better public facilities, to create stronger linkages between community members and policymakers, and to contribute to national-level policy advocacy for improved public services.
Over six rounds, the programme combined two working models. Four rounds, Round 1, Round 2, Round 3 and Round 6, involved a physical exchange of participants: ten community radio professionals from Bangladesh and ten from Nepal took part directly in cross-border placements. The remaining two, Round 4 and Round 5, advanced the same objectives without physical exchange, with each organization working through its own staff while keeping both countries' work aligned to a shared thematic framework.
Alongside the direct exchange of personnel, Rupantar and AMARC Asia-Pacific have used the accumulated experience of six rounds to work toward a cross-country network of community broadcasters, so that a growing number of stations in both countries can take part in promoting public health facilities as a shared, rights-based concern.
Across all six rounds, Rupantar did not act in a single, fixed capacity. Depending on the direction of exchange and the requirements of each round, Rupantar functioned simultaneously or sequentially as a home organization, a host organization and a coordinating partner within the NOREC framework.
For every Bangladeshi participant who travelled to Nepal, Rupantar identified and prepared community radio professionals from its own team and wider network, briefed them on each round's objectives, and remained their point of institutional continuity throughout the placement. On return, Rupantar absorbed the knowledge and cross-cultural experience each participant brought back, reflected in how many exchange alumni have gone on to build their careers within Rupantar itself.
For every Nepali participant who came to Bangladesh, Rupantar took responsibility for orientation to the country, its community radio landscape and Rupantar's own Community Learning Program (CLP) model, and for day-to-day integration into ongoing production work. It was through this role that Rupantar transmitted the CLP model most directly, before participants carried elements of it back to their own stations.
Beyond individual participants, Rupantar worked jointly with AMARC Asia-Pacific to plan each round's thematic focus, agree participant numbers and selection criteria, align logistics and timelines across two countries, and report progress to NOREC, a role that extended even to Round 4 and Round 5, when no physical exchange took place.
Rounds 1 through 3 ran consecutively between 2016 and 2019 and shared a single thematic focus, allowing both organizations to deepen the same body of practice over three progressively longer placements. Round 4 and Round 5 shifted attention toward community and public health facilities, carried out without physical exchange. Round 6, implemented between February 2023 and February 2024, returned to a physical exchange format with an advocacy-oriented theme.
| Round | Thematic Title | Duration | Participants | Physical Exchange |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Health Communication and Education through Participatory Learning Models Using Community Radio | 7 months | 2 BD / 2 NP | Yes |
| 02 | Health Communication and Education through Participatory Learning Models Using Community Radio | 12 months | 3 BD / 3 NP | Yes |
| 03 | Health Communication and Education through Participatory Learning Models Using Community Radio | 13 months | 3 BD / 3 NP | Yes |
| 04 | Improving Community Level Public Facilities by Strengthening Community Voice | 4 months | Rupantar & AMARC-AP staff (in-country) | No |
| 05 | Improving Community Level Public Health Facilities through Engagement of Targeted Communities Using Radio Programs | 12 months | Rupantar & AMARC-AP staff (in-country) | No |
| 06 | Uphold Community Voice to Public Health-related Policy and Practice in Bangladesh and Nepal | 12 months | 2 BD / 2 NP | Yes |
As the opening round, Round 1 set the template for everything that followed. Naiema Yeasmin and Saki Rejoana travelled from Bangladesh to Nepal for the shortest of the four physical-exchange placements, designed to test the working relationship between Rupantar and AMARC Asia-Pacific. Working with their host station's team, they studied how participatory learning models were used to communicate health messages to rural and semi-urban audiences, while introducing their Nepali colleagues to Rupantar's own community engagement techniques. Round 1's central achievement was proof of concept: it demonstrated that a Bangladesh-Nepal community radio exchange could function in practice, laying the ground for the far longer rounds that followed.
Round 2 expanded the exchange considerably: three participants travelled from each country, and the placement period doubled. Abida Sultana, Sutapa Paul and Sikdar Al Mamun worked alongside Upasana Kumari Tiwary, Malati Neupane and MakarRaj Dhami, with a full year to move beyond orientation into sustained collaborative production. Participants followed health communication initiatives from planning through broadcast and community feedback, designing participatory learning segments for Nepali audiences while gaining a deeper understanding of how community radio stations in Nepal structured outreach, staffing and audience engagement, knowledge that fed directly back into Rupantar's own practice.
The longest placement of the programme. S. M. Saiful Islam Sumon, Md. Fakrul Islam Rony and Olifa Kabir represented Bangladesh, hosted by Rajesh Ramtel, Chandrakala Khatri and Menaka Ghatri in Nepal. By this stage the two organizations had a well-tested working relationship, allowing participants to move quickly into substantive collaboration. This round is notable as the one during which Rupantar's Community Learning Program model was actively introduced into host-station programming in Nepal. Round 3 also closed out the 2016 to 2019 phase of the partnership, across which sixteen participants in total had taken part, a track record that gave NOREC the basis to renew its support for a further phase.
Round 4 turned toward a different goal: improving community-level public facilities by strengthening community voice. Rupantar's own team applied community radio and mobilization techniques to help local communities raise concerns about shared infrastructure, such as water points, roads and health posts, with local authorities, while AMARC Asia-Pacific pursued a parallel effort in Nepal. Though the two teams were not physically exchanged, a shared thematic framework kept the work aligned, and the round's compact timeframe functioned as a transition ahead of the longer Round 5.
Round 5 refined the focus introduced in Round 4, narrowing in on public health facilities specifically: improving community-level access to and engagement with health services through targeted radio programming. Rupantar's team used community radio to help target communities engage more directly with local public health facilities, encouraging listeners to use available services and giving communities a channel to raise concerns about gaps in service delivery, while AMARC Asia-Pacific carried out equivalent work within its own network in Nepal.
Round 6 marked a shift toward upholding community voice within public health-related policy and practice, a more advocacy-oriented focus than earlier rounds. Mou Paul and Ayesha Akter Rumana travelled from Bangladesh to work with Kajall Tamang and Deepak Khatri in Nepal, focusing less on individual health messaging and more on how community radio could channel community concerns into public health policy conversations. The round produced a body of public service announcements and longer-format radio programs that AMARC Asia-Pacific has since made available through its own channels.
A Bangladeshi institutional practice that continued to shape programming in Nepal long after the participants who carried it there had returned home.
A defining thread running through the exchange rounds was the introduction of Rupantar's Community Learning Program (CLP) approach to Nepal's community radio sector. As Bangladeshi participants worked within their host stations, most concertedly during Round 3, they shared the CLP model with their Nepali counterparts at AMARC Asia-Pacific: a participatory format built around direct community engagement, local voice and issue-based learning.
Nepali community radio personnel adapted elements of this approach into their own programming, extending the reach of Rupantar's community media practice beyond Bangladesh's borders and strengthening the exchange partnership's long-term impact on both countries' community radio movements. The CLP transfer stands as one of the clearest, most durable outcomes of the exchange.
Through six rounds of the NOREC exchange, Rupantar strengthened its institutional capacity in cross-cultural community media practice and built a cadre of trained community radio professionals with international exchange experience. The organization deepened its partnership with AMARC Asia-Pacific, a relationship running since 2016, and its Community Learning Program model gained wider regional recognition through its adoption in Nepal. Most notably, the majority of Rupantar's exchanged participants have gone on to build lasting careers in community media, several of them continuing directly with Rupantar.
A further, independently verifiable measure of Rupantar's achievement is NOREC's own funding history with the programme. Following the results of the 2016 to 2019 rounds, NOREC renewed its support for a further multi-year phase, a decision that reflects the donor's own assessment of the earlier rounds' success. Rupantar's continued participation as co-implementing partner through this renewal, and into the sixth round completed in 2024, demonstrates a sustained level of programme delivery, financial accountability and partner reliability that a technical donor such as NOREC does not extend automatically.
AMARC Asia-Pacific's community radio stations benefited from the perspective, energy and technical exchange brought by Bangladeshi participants across the four rounds of physical exchange, including the introduction of the CLP model. Nepali participants carried their learning forward into subsequent careers in community media and related fields, extending the partnership's impact within Nepal's community radio sector.
Jointly, Rupantar and AMARC Asia-Pacific used the partnership to work toward a broader cross-country network of community broadcasters, with the alumni of six rounds forming the core of that emerging network. The partnership's reach grew accordingly: from a single seven-month pilot round in 2016 involving four participants, to a programme that by its most recent renewal was designed to engage significantly larger cohorts of broadcasters from both countries.
Twenty community radio professionals took part directly in the four physical-exchange rounds of the programme, ten from Bangladesh and ten from Nepal. Each placement contributed, in its own way, to the outcomes described above: the deepening of Rupantar's and AMARC Asia-Pacific's institutional partnership, the transfer of the Community Learning Program model into Nepal, and the body of participatory health and advocacy programming produced across six rounds.
One of two Bangladeshi participants in the pilot round. Over seven months in Nepal, she helped test how Rupantar's community engagement techniques could be introduced into a host station's health communication programming.
Continuing a career in community media
Travelled to Nepal alongside Naiema Yeasmin in the programme's pilot round, one of the two placements that established the working relationship between Rupantar and AMARC Asia-Pacific.
Continuing career development with Rupantar
Continuing career development with Rupantar
One of three Bangladeshi participants in the twelve-month round, following health communication initiatives in Nepal from planning through broadcast and community feedback.
Continuing professional development in community media
Continuing career development with Rupantar
Coordinator, Audio-Visual Unit, Rupantar
Took part in the thirteen-month round during which the CLP model was actively introduced into host stations in Nepal, working with Nepali counterparts to adapt its participatory format to local health communication needs.
Continuing a career in community media
The third Bangladeshi participant in Round 3, among the group credited with embedding the CLP approach into host-station programming in Nepal.
Continuing a professional path in community media
Travelled to Nepal in Round 6, the advocacy-oriented round focused on community voice within public health policy and practice.
Continuing career development with Rupantar
Community Volunteer, Radio Pollikontho 99.2 FM, Moulvibazar / Rupantar
One of two Nepali participants in Round 1, hosting Rupantar's Bangladeshi delegates during the pilot round and helping establish how a host station would work alongside incoming participants.
Continuing a career in community media
Worked alongside Sona Khatik to host and collaborate with the first cohort of Bangladeshi participants, building trust and a shared production process within a compressed seven-month timeframe.
Continuing a career in community media
One of three Nepali hosts in Round 2, gaining direct exposure to Rupantar's participatory production techniques over a full twelve-month placement.
Continuing professional development in community media
Worked with Bangladeshi participants over twelve months designing participatory health communication content; helped absorb Round 2's larger visiting group into sustained collaboration.
Continuing a career in community media
Gained deeper exposure to Rupantar's participatory community engagement work over the year-long round, knowledge shared directly by the visiting Bangladeshi team.
Continuing a professional path in community media
One of three Nepali hosts in Round 3, the round most closely associated with introducing the CLP model into Nepal, working with visiting participants to adapt its format to local needs.
Continues at a community radio station in Nepal; remains active in the AMARC Asia-Pacific network
One of three Nepali hosts over the thirteen-month placement during which the CLP model was actively absorbed into host-station programming.
Continuing a career in community media
Took part in adapting a participatory, community-driven production format to local health communication needs alongside her Bangladeshi counterparts.
Continuing a career in community media
Contributed to producing radio content designed to channel community concerns into policy conversations with local authorities and service providers.
Continuing professional development in community media
Hosted Bangladeshi colleagues over the twelve-month, advocacy-focused round, extending the partnership's reach into public health policy advocacy.
Continuing a career in community media
Over six rounds spanning close to a decade, the NOREC Bangladesh-Nepal Exchange Programme allowed Rupantar and AMARC Asia-Pacific to build a genuine, tested partnership grounded in mutual learning. Bangladeshi and Nepali community radio professionals exchanged not only technical skills but culture, language and community media philosophy, most visibly through the introduction of the Community Learning Program model to Nepal.
Rupantar carried this partnership forward through every role the programme required of it: as home organization for its own outgoing participants, as host organization for incoming Nepali participants, and as coordinating partner working alongside AMARC Asia-Pacific and NOREC, consistently enough that the programme was renewed and extended well beyond its original scope.
The success of the majority of participants in building lasting careers in community media, many within Rupantar itself, stands as a testament to the programme's impact on the individuals who took part. Together with NOREC's own decision to extend its support, and the continuing use of the Community Learning Program model in Nepal, this record shows a partnership that met the objectives it set for itself.