Archive for the 'experiences' Category

Internet radio for migrant workers

An article by María Teresa Aveggio & Teresia Mutuku explains how the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants (APMM) trained a group of migrants from the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand in radio production and broadcasting techniques. The trainees, a group of 20 migrant workers, most of them women, are now able to produce, broadcast and upload podcasts onto the APMM website thus reaching more migrants. The programmes are also recorded and distributed on CD.

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When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan

In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don’t have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don’t have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio.

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Information sharing with farmers

FADECOJoseph Sekiku of Tanzania’s FADECO Telecentre & Community Radio sent the following report on their use of new ICTs in combination with radio to better communicate with farmers.

FADECO Community Radio is a local radio in NW Tanzania. Its programming is characterised with a strong focus on rural development (65%) with the rest of the air time distributed among 25% news and general information and entertainment (culture, history, arts) at 10%. Agriculture takes the lions share of our programming.

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Social networking and radio

RadarCulturaThe BBC’s radio programme Digital Planet did a story recently about Radio Cultura, a not-for-profit station owned by a Catholic foundation in Brazil that uses a radio programme and a website to create multimedia social networks. Listeners to the programme, RadarCultura, can propose songs and discussion topics on the programme’s website and the ones that receive the most votes get played or discussed on the radio.

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Community media and SMS text messages

SMSAt first glance SMS text messages would seem like a natural for inclusion in a community radio station’s essential toolkit. SMS messages are inexpensive and easy-to-use and in recent years the mobile phones that are needed for sending and receiving them have become ubiquitous. However, a survey of recent projects indicates that use of SMS messages among community media in the developing world is still at an early stage. In most stations SMS use is informal. The few cases identified of community stations making more complex use of SMS messages have accompanied political crises or natural disasters and have inevitably been donor financed. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS by community media without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.

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