The Channapatna Health Library started as an initiative driven by informal coalition of 12 women community Health Navigators (HNs) supported by MAYA (a not-for-profit organization), academic researchers, co-designers (includes members of Design Beku until 2024), Free Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) activists (Janastu), engineers, and community experts. Since April 2024, Channapatna Health Library is being incubated by the Aruvu Collaboratory in collaboration with Manesiri, a women-led producer collective based in Channapatna.
CHL is enabled by Papad, an open source, internet-independent, low-literate friendly platform co-designed with the HNs and developed by Janastu. CHL currently has about ~200 audio-video items (in the local languages of Kannada and Dakhani) of local health and wellbeing.
It is a digital repository of local health experiences and traditional knowledge about wellbeing practices as a way to facilitate ethical, locally meaningful and sustainable care work and activities through community-owned digital health infrastructure . One of the primary use cases of CHL has been the women HNs acting as researchers who not only collect and collate the lived experiences but also act as medium of health knowledge exchange between their communities and public health actors to educate and activate them with information that is locally rooted and relevant, but is missing from public health information and the global Internet. This offers the ground for us to collectively speculate and reimagine alternative forms of AI tools to augment, enhance and foster the HNs’ emerging knowledge and content practices.
It was supported by MAYA (a not-for-profit organization), and members of the Design Beku collective in collaboration with Janastu. Since April 2024, Channapatna Health Library is being incubated by the Aruvu Collaboratory in collaboration with Manesiri, a to-be women’s producer organisation led by the 12 women community Health Navigators (HNs).