Local & community broadcasting and new ICTs
“HD radio, which has struggled to establish itself among emerging audio technologies, had another lackluster year.”
The first sentence of HD Radio chapter in “The State of the News Media“, an annual review prepared on the media in the USA by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism says it all.
In Podcasts: a community knowledge sharing tool, an article published on SciDevNet, Lawrence D. Gudza describes a pilot project in Zimbabwe that uses podcasts to get development information to the people of Zimbabwe’s rural district of Mbire, home to small agricultural communities without electricity, land line telephones or mobile phone infrastructure.
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.
An article on the Science and Development Network (Pod-ready: Podcasting for the developing world) takes another look at podcasting and development, with a focus on the SIRU project by Practical Action (formerly ITDG) in Peru and the e-TukTuk that is part of Sri Lanka’s Kothmale Community radio project. Both of the projects are presented elsewhere on this blog.
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.
