Across many countries and in different regions, community radio stations have been fostering community participation and creating an appetite for transparent and accountable governance, even in challenging regulatory environments. Empowering Radio: Good practices in development & operation of community radio is a report prepared for the World Bank Institute based on five national studies of community radio practices in five very different countries: Colombia, Mali, Nepal, Peru and South Africa.
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From the report Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs
More than 5,000 people died and 1.6 million were displaced as a result of the May 2006 earthquake in Yogyakarta and Central Java in Indonesia. During the days and weeks following the disaster, ordinary citizens received valuable news via text message. The text messaging service was put in place by Internews, a U.S.- based NGO that works to improve people’s access to information around the world.
The service was run through an emergency AM radio station, Radio Punokawan, established by the Indonesian Press and Broadcast Society, with support from Internews. In addition to radio broadcasts, important information was sent and received from the newsroom via text messaging. Outgoing messages warned of aftershocks and identified communities that had not yet received government assistance. More than 180 Indonesian journalists distributed and received information through the service.
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The February 2008 issue of SPORE, the magazine of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has an article by Ednah Karamagi, a member of a Ugandan team “committed to pushing out the ICT frontiers” describes some of the ways they are using Web 2.0 applications to help farmers boost production and sell their produce for a better price. The applications used include podcasts.
Another knowledge-sharing method we use is podcasts. Farmers who are knowledgeable about a given subject make recordings, currently in local languages, though we plan to add English at a later stage. These are then turned into audio CDs and distributed to other farmers, who have received CD players from BROSDI. Copies of these recordings are also uploaded on the CELAC website.
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The ICT for development community of the Development Gateway has collected a number of links to podcasts in a feature about “Podcast Libraries“. There is a mention of the SIRU (Sistema de información rural urbana) podcast experiment in Cajamarca, a largely rural province in northern Peru. The BBC programme Go Digital recently did an optimistic story on this project a few years ago, but the project never went beyond the pilot stage. There are also links to the OneWorld Radio development news service and AGFAX Radio, a monthly package of programmes featuring interviews about agricultural issues.
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UNESCO’s New Delhi office has just published a booklet “Forging Innovations: Community Multimedia Centres in Nepal”. The publication includes a collection of case studies on the Community Multimedia Centres (CMC) in Nepal and is intended to showcase the interesting and diverse growth of this initiative in spite of conflict and the lack of community radio regulation in Nepal.
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