Have you met Sipalu Sister?

Have you met Sipalu Sister? तपाईले सिपालु सिस्टरलाई भेट्नु भयो त?

The Sipalu Sister project, by Maker Keti and Yellow Nepal, aims to empower Nepali women by providing them with the information and inspiration they need to become more confident, independent and take on more active roles in their communities. The project targets women living in rural areas, particularly those who are illiterate and have limited access to resources and in-person training opportunities

Sipalu Sister officially started in October 2023 with a mission to create an accessible online platform for life skill learning. On September 2024, we launched our platform with 15 instructional videos premiering simultaneously on our website and YouTube channel at 3:00 pm. What started as meetings within the team to discuss objectives and potential collaborators has become 50 episodes across seven general topics, developed with the assistance of five organisations and several individuals.

Our 50 episodes fall under seven overarching topics: Simple Tools, Basic Electricals, First Aid, Nutrition, Sewing, Financial Literacy and Digital Safety. Each of these seven topics have several episodes to give practical, informative knowledge for our viewers. A full listing of our topics and their episodes are below:

Simple Tools 1) What is a hammer & how to use it 2)  How to hammer a nail 3) Types of nails 4) Screws vs nails 5) How to use a screwdriver 6) How to measuring length Basic Sewing 7) Make a sewing kit 8) Threading a needle & making knots 9) How to do Running Stitch 10) How to do Back Stitch 11) How to do Hemming Stitch 12) Introduction to altering 13) How to altering clothes length 14) How to alter clothes width 15) Repairing tears in our clothes 16) Replacing buttons 17) Replacing hooks

Basic Electricals 18) Basic electrical tools 19) Important electrical safety 20) Introduction to sockets & plugs 21) How to check electricity in sockets 22) Types of light bulbs 23) How to change a light bulb 24) How to change a tube light 25) How to strip a wire 26) How to change a two-pin plug   First Aid 27) What is First Aid & making a First Aid Kit 28) Symptoms & treatment for Fever 29) Treating simple cuts 30) Treating diarrhoea 31) Treating fever 32) Treating burns 33) Managing sprains, dislocations, fractures & broken bones

Nutrition 34) Introduction to Nutrition 35) Proper handling of food 36) Nutritional needs for under five 37) Nutritional needs for adolescents 38) Nutritional needs for pre & post-natal women 39) Nutritional needs for adults & elderly   Basic Financial Literacy 40) Basics of Financial Planning 41) Basics of Investing 42) Basics of Savings 43) Basics of Insurance 44) How and why to open a bank account Digital Safety 45) How to do Voice Search 46) Basic Internet safety 47) Basic Phone safety 48) Keeping safe in the digital space 48) Support for online harassment 49) Protecting our kids online 50) Anatomy of a phone

As work began, writing the scripts for these episodes became the most challenging aspect of our work. It consisted of researching many topics, grasping the core concept and then synthesising the information to make it concise and deliverable in semi-formal language that would be easy to understand for our target audience. The collaborators we sought for the project were very helpful in guiding us and providing accurate information. Keeping in mind our target audience, we were very particular about explaining things in a basic level so that it is easy grasp for all people, irrespective of their literacy levels.

Rather than generating a fictitious target audience, it significantly helped us to centre our message and content when our target audience was a real person with a name and personal history. Ms. Dil Maya Tamang, became our real-life target audience persona. Dil Maya Tamang is a single mother of two. Her husband left her years ago. She is illiterate and trying to make ends meet in Kathmandu City, far away from her maternal village in Dhading. When her bulb goes out at night, or she worries about how to have some savings for her kids’ future or her child comes home with an intense fever, there is no one she can turn to to help her figure out what to do. Luckily, she has a smart phone and knows how to look at videos online. Sipalu Sister is a project intended to help women like Dil Maya make informed decisions, be more independent and confident in her day to day life and significantly improve her standard of living through easy to understand instructional online videos on basic life skills. Our videos have been tailor made for women like Dil Maya who are the primary household decision makers, either by choice or circumstance, so that they can have easily available, educational content in a language that they readily understand.

Just as it was important to have a tangible target audience persona for us to create our videos for, it was equally important for us to be mindful when choosing the instructors for these videos. The instructors needed to be confident about the topic of instruction, so that confidence could be passed on to the viewer. It was also important that they were able to communicate clearly and amiably to the audience. However, in addition to that, it was critical to have all the instructors be women, specifically of diverse ethnicities. Our target audience is Nepali speaking women everywhere. And Nepalis are ethnically very diverse. Unfortunately, that diversity is often not reflected in the mass media. However, representation matters. To be able to see someone who is a woman and who looks like you, sharing new information or technique, helps to build confidence in one’s own ability. We are very proud to have been able to work with 10 very diverse and very competent instructors for our videos.

With our diverse set of instructors giving instructions on several different topics, it was essential to give some sense of uniformity to our videos. To create this uniformity and identity, we setup up a small studio space in which all our videos were filmed. The background, with its two-toned wall, hand-painted logo and shelves with props and supplies are consistent for all our videos and designed to have a rustic, warm vibe to give a homely feel for our viewers. Additionally, all our instructors wore our bespoke apron with an element from our logo to further craft this uniformity.

To create our brand and identity, we finalised our logo early on by collaborating with illustrator and artist KripaKreations. Our logo is circle of hands surrounding our name, symbolising the passing of knowledge from one woman to another. For our aprons, we used the “S” that the hands form in our logo printed in the front. We created both a Nepali and English version of the logo.

Our tagline is: सबैका लागि उपयोगी ज्ञान (Sabaika lagi upayogi gyan) / Essential Life Skills for All. We are also using an informal tagline “आज के सिक्ने त?” (Aaja ke sikne ta?) / “What shall we learn today?” for some of our videos and merchandise.

After extensive searching, we were introduced to Sustainable Media Initiative for Land and Environment (SMILE) for filming our episodes. Their background in documentary film making gave them the depth and authenticity required for our project. Despite the limited budget, they have produced beautiful, professional videos for our project. Together as a team, we came up with a strategy to have a topic-specific border around our videos so that our audience would be able to identify the topic of our videos by simple looking at this border, even if they couldn’t read the title.

As the filming of our episodes neared completion and progressed towards editing, we were able to have musician Avaya S. Bajracharya create a series of custom music clips for our Sipalu Sister videos. These customised music clips will be used in all our episodes, reels and relevant videos.

Meanwhile, there was continual progress on our website throughout the course of the year. Multiple iterations later, we were finally able to create an easy to navigate, bi-lingual website catering to our more literate audience and those who might be eager to partner with us in the future. The landing page has our videos for easy perusal as well as links for our social media accounts and other pages if they want to know more about the organisation and partners.

With our episodes filmed and finalised, and website ready, our team got ready for launch day. Two weeks before launch, we released our teaser video on our social media outlets. Then on September 20^th, 2024, at Yala Maya Kendra in Lalitpur, we officially launched our platform: our YouTube Channel and our bi-lingual website. We had 15 of our videos premiere simultaneously at 3:00pm Nepal time on YouTube and we received many videos showing our well-wishers around Nepal and abroad counting down and watching the premiere together. Our chief guest, Mr Michael Harker of the US Embassy launched our platform with a classic clap of a clapperboard. Our launch was attended by 80 people, ranging from women entrepreneurs to people working in various NGOs and INGOs.

The following week or so after launch, we had a few hundred followers in TikTok, YouTube and Instagram each. Our highest viewed reel on Instagram had 25,000 views, within the first week of launch, while one of our TikTok reels has 68,800 (and counting) views. Our videos on YouTube have been viewed 4500 times so far, with the highest views being on our video about preparing nutritious food. We currently have 700 followers on TikTok and 300 subscribers on YouTube.

Since our launch, we have been releasing a new video every Friday at 3:00pm Nepal time. With every video, we hope to touch the lives of thousands of Nepali women across the diaspora, increase their self-confidence and their willingness to learn new things and to improve their independence and standard of living.

We are grateful to the US Embassy Nepal and the Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund for their invaluable financial assistance in making this project happen.