Cholera outbreaks were a recurring problem in Dondo, Central Mozambique, resulting in 200 painful deaths each year. Once the community radio station started broadcasting health programmes in Sena and Ndau, the local languages, people understood how they got ill and changed their behaviour. The next year no one in Dondo died from cholera.

In the age of the Internet and cell phone, community radio remains a powerful way for people to connect, learn and discuss issues important to their lives. Like the name would indicate, a community radio station is built and run by a community.  It usually has a relatively small footprint (up to 60 miles) and broadcasts in the local language.  Community radio station licences are based on not accepting funds from political parties or supporting one political party or candidate over another, and are owned, managed and run by community members. Although they may receive donor funding to start, they have to be sustained by the community in the long term.

Communication strengthens grassroots development

A community radio station is an essential development tool. It provides a vehicle for true empowerment and grassroots development. When the community station is owned and run by local women and men overall community involvement is strong. Gaining access to accurate information and having an opportunity to voice opinions through call-in shows or by working with programme production at the station, the community can use the radio station to address problems and find lasting solutions.  When the radio station is ‘ours’, listeners trust the programming.  There is confidence in what is aired, advice is more likely to be followed, and positive, social change can take root.

Community radio has been used to stimulate social change the world over since the 1940s in Latin America and the US, and in Europe since the early 1970s. Since the early 90s it has increasingly been recognised as a powerful tool for empowerment in communities tackling social, political and economic development challenges, not least in Africa. Hundreds of community stations in South Africa, Mali, Mozambique and Niger, for example, all broadcast locally relevant content – news, health, agriculture & environment, education, rights, announcements, and so forth.

Rosa from Radio GESOM in Chimoio, Mozambique

In addition, community radio is effectively used for celebration, preservation and further development of local culture.  For example, many community stations in South Africa broadcast ‘stories of the ancestors’, which is an important cultural component of life. When the radio station airs in the local language, new pride blossoms as I saw in Tanzania with a Maasai community who said to me, “through our own radio station, we got our identity back!”. In Ghana, traditional chiefs have adopted community radio to interact with their people.

Empowering women by giving them a voice

Issaka Maïmouna Habibou, Director of ’Radio Communitaire Terá’ in Niger

It has taken a while to get women behind the microphones in many communities: women traditionally work in the home, in the field, as well as walk to collect firewood and water. Taking the lead in public is quite foreign to the role of women in a rural African context. But this notion has changed in many communities, realising that, actually, women are at the core of the family and the community. It is women who tell the stories about the past and pass on the traditions to the young ones. Women also want to learn about women’s issues from a woman’s voice.

Women station managers are still not commonplace. But where they are, the stations are often more sustainable. In Terá, Niger, 140 kms outside the capital Niamey, it was Issaka Maïmouna Habibou, who received me in the Director’s office. And all the people working at the station were women. She explained that the station’s money had disappeared along with CDs and equipment. When the radio board had finalised their investigation, letting those with long fingers go, only women were left.

In most African countries, literacy is still a challenge. Large populations are not sufficiently literate to read a newspaper or to use the Internet actively. This is where radio still comes into its own as a communication tool and will continue to do so for a long time to come.

Birgitte Jallov is the founder of EMPOWERHOUSE, an organisation that assists communities, non-profits, governments and funders with finding integrated solutions to create and strengthen community radio. Her book ‘Empowerment Radio – Voices creating a community’ will be published soon. To learn more about community radio contact Birgitte on birgitte.jallov@mail.dk. Follow EMPOWERHOUSE on twitter.

Today is why I do my life’s work. My colleague, Phil Goodwin*, and I spent the day in Bugasera, Rwanda in an area where prior to the genocide, the population was 64,000, afterwards 2,000. We spoke with 30 (50/50 female/male) child heads of households who had received our Lifeline radios 6 months ago in collaboration with local NGO, Trust and Care. Between the ages of 12 and 20, they had walked up to three hours to come and as always, I learned more than I thought I would and it never gets any easier.

All live at the hard edge of grinding poverty. As heads of their families, they’ve sacrificed an education to enable their younger brothers and sisters to attend school. The government’s ambitious programme to get youngsters into school and to learn English means more students in primary school than the system can cope with. Learners attend either the morning or afternoon classes.

Rwanda aims to join the Commonwealth and about 85% of the population speaks only Kinyarwanda. A significant number of teachers were killed in the genocide and it has taken years to rebuild classrooms and basic teaching capacity and few teachers speak English themselves.

When I first visited Bugasera in 1999, there were pockets of ‘feral’ children – hundreds of child-only families living in round mud and thatch houses. Children wore rags showing their distended stomachs, trying to eke out an existence by subsistence farming with little or no adult guidance. Water had to be collected from a swampy area at the bottom of the hill an hour’s walk away. It was impossible to imagine that children would have to live like this. Understandably, they seldom smiled or laughed.

The dirt road was so pockmarked from Kigali that we rarely got out of first gear and it could take over two hours to reach this area. Now it’s a smooth 45 minutes as there’s a fine highway linking Kigali to the bustling market town of Nyamata (and onto Bujumbura) and the road to the meeting place we were in has been gravel paved with concrete gutters.  I saw small shops selling basics on rural back roads and there are more bicycles and bicycle taxis.  The rickety mud brick thatch traditional homes are slowly being replaced with rectangular two and four room houses with tin roofs under new government regulations.  Most had pit latrines nearby. Despite, visible progress these orphans remain abjectly poor and the complex factors of poverty reinforce each other.

Chantal in her school uniform drawing water, Bugasera, Rwanda.

Rwanda has the strictest environmental laws on the continent, but there are markedly fewer trees and greater soil erosion than 10 years ago.  Although, there is now a water pipe,  the children say they become sick unless they boil the water, using wood and creating further deforestation. Girls said they still fetch water up to 3 times a day. The rains have been poor and hungry, and malnutrition remains a serious problem.

What We Wanted to Find Out

We asked a series of questions to only girls and only boys and then together. We wanted to learn about what they listen to, what they’ve learned or do differently since having the radio, what they do for lighting and after dark, what is important to them and how they see their future.

Not one person owned a radio previously and none have a cell phone or had even made a phone call. They said they got their information from neighbours and word of mouth. To sum up their comments, all said that they listen to ‘amakuru’ – the news.  They want to know what is going on not just in Rwanda, but they’re curious about what is happening in frontier states and beyond. Girls cited programmes about health, AIDS, abuse, and women and children’s rights as most important. Betty, 20, said that “they were learning from the radio that it was not acceptable to abuse girls and women and that they now had laws to protect them”. Before she had her radio, she didn’t know this. Given the rates of rape during the genocide and in the refugee camps, her comment is not surprising. Boys also said that they want to listen to sports, to follow the national and international soccer teams and they liked agricultural and livestock programmes, citing Imbera Heza, a radio programme that Lifeline Energy funds on Radio Salus.

Girls Foucs Group with Lifeline radio

We asked the focus groups if had Rf 2000 (about $30) what would be the three things they would buy? I heard something that I never heard before – bottled water, which costs about 50c for a small bottle.  Food was mentioned and thirdly, kerosene.

The group had a lively discussion about lighting and all the problems it causes.  Several said that from firewood, candles, kerosene tin can lamps called ‘italas’, they had lost their belongings to fire. They are particularly worried about their sisters and brothers having to study with kerosene because of the harm it does to the eyes and lungs.

We then asked if they had a clean and safe lighting source how would their lives be different. Nearly everyone raised their hand – “I would go to the toilet at night”; “I could see when I eat to make sure there are no bugs in my food”; “I would not have as much stress worrying about accidents and fires”; “I could cook in the dark.”

I then demonstrated the Lifelight and spontaneous applause broke out.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough to give to everyone, so we visited several homes after wards and distributed them privately.

Hope – It’s Breaking Out All Over

We ended by talking about the future and again, I heard something that I’ve never heard so emphatically before – they have a sense of hope – mainly from listening to President Kagame on the radio. They felt strongly that he had brought peace and stability to Rwanda and with that had comes development. They felt that before they had no future but now believe that he will lead them to a better one. They gave him credit for everything good that has happened to Rwanda.

*Phil Goodwin is the Executive Director of Lifeline Energy’s for-profit trading arm, Lifeline Technologies Trading Ltd.