Pariah News will be a citizen media and crowdsourcing enabled project by and for sex workers based in Madagascar to ensure protection of their rights, better access to AIDS treatment and prevention practices, empowerment and AIDS related public health data collection.
Pariah News is a joint project between FOKO Madagascar, a Rising Voices (funded by the Knight Foundation) grantee that promotes the use of citizen media to promote social and environmental changes, and FIMIZORE, a NGO based in Antanarivo, Madagascar that strives for the protection of sex workers and men who have sex with men's rights (MSMs). It stands for (Fikambanana Miaro ny ZO an'ny REhetra) which translates from Malagasy as Association for the Protection of the Rights of Everyone. FIMIZORE was one recipient of the UNAIDS 2008 Red Ribbon award. FIMIZORE reaches 15,000 female sex workers and 2,000 men who have sex with men.
There is a need for health related news (such as updates on clinics and health care available, updates on AIDS projects held in Madagascar, portraits of sex workers, health statuses and updates, potential cases of violences...) not fulfilled by the traditional media in Madagascar, targeted specifically to people at risk to get contaminated by the HIV virus. In addition to creating news, Pariah News will reaffirm and empower ostracized sex workers in Madagascar, by providing a window to their world and a first step towards reintegration in society, as well as a means to learning computer skills (for those sex workers who will be trained to use citizen media tools). Pariah News will be broadcast via SMS phone messages, internet radio and blogs. Sex workers participating in the project will SMS status and incident reporting via Ushahidi platform.
A printed monthly digest will also be available in each FIMIZORE NGO office of the cities we are targeting.

There is a definite lack of public health data on the use of health care facilities by sex workers. In turn, monitoring potential health risks for sex workers and their clients is difficult to achieve. Our project will facilitate updates by sex workers about their health status anonymously, willingly and in real-time.     It will also allow sex workers to report potential cases of violence against them immediately without waiting for an official police report. It will be a complementary to the national emergency phone line.

The use of citizen media, crowdsourcing to help better public healt access is a revolutionary one. FIMIZORE and FOKO will work on spreading news relevant to the sex workers by periodically SMS-ing a short text message with a title describing the news, including a phone number to call should he/she be interested in the subject. The recipient has then the option to dial the number and listen to news. The innovation resides in the reporting done by the sex worker himself instead of a journalist in the usual media who may still infuse the reporting with the usual biases. The innovation is also in the push/pull news choice mix as well as in the audio SMS format.