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When the GSM mobile telephone standard was developed engineers included the ability to send short text messages, up to 160 characters, between phones. Operators were sceptical about the service’s ability to interest customers or to generate revenue, but consumers massively took it up as a convenient and inexpensive alternative to voice calls.  With time applications and services were developed enabling, for example, broadcast messages, mobile payments, polling and information services. In 2007 global revenue from SMS messages was more than $50 billion with more than 1 trillion messages sent.(1)

As mobile phones become increasingly common, SMS messages are being used by community media in a variety of ways.

At its simplest, announcers and journalists announce their phone mumbers over the air and invite listeners to send messages with comments on the news, questions, greetings, song requests… Some of these are then used on-air. In some cases, stations have devised ways of generating feedback via mobiles without the listeners having to pay even the cost of an SMS message. For example, Xtreme FM, a community-oriented pirate station in the UK, has a mobile permanently in the studio:

“It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.”(2)

Another example is Interactive Radio for Justice, a radio programme in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that answers listeners’ questions about justice issues sent by SMS. Ethan Zuckerman points out that sending questions via SMS allows for anonymity, an important point when your question is: “Are soldiers allowed to stay at my house and eat my food without paying for it?”

Desktop software and web-based services allow stations to do more. International broadcasters such as the BBC make extensive use of these tools as do some commercial stations. However, there are few examples of local and community radio using them, even though they offer a low-cost and relatively simple way of stimulating participation and interaction.

There are various software and service packages available. Among them is FrontlineSMS(3), a programme that runs on a computer connected by a cable to an ordinary mobile phone. Unlike most other programs and services, FrontlineSMS does not require a connection to the internet – messages are composed, stored and processed on the computer and sent and received on the mobile. There are a variety of tools available with different capabilities and pricing.(4) Basic services useful for community media include:

• - Broadcast messages to dozens or even thousands of mobiles advising them of a special programme or an important community activity

• - Keyword response – when a listener sends the word “ocio” the station replies with a text message listing activities while “noticias” is answered with current headlines and “Colectivo a Lima” is answered with the departure times of the next six buses to the capital

Experiencies combining SMS services and broadcast radio can be found in moments of political crisis and natural disasters. For example, SMS and radio were used to help monitor the 2000 presidential elections in Ghana:

[V]oters who were prevented from voting used mobile phones to report their experience to call-in shows on local radio stations. The stations broadcast the reports, prompting police to respond to the accusations of voter intimidation. Had voters called the police directly, it’s possible that authorities might not have responded — by making reports public through the radio, voters eliminated the possibility of police announcing that there had been no reports of voter intimidation. Similar techniques have been used in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and even in the United States — American voters used mobile phone cameras and Websites to record reports of voting irregularities during the 2006 congressional elections.(5)

The ongoing political crisis in Zimbabwe provides another example of the complementarity of radio and SMS. Faced with one of the most repressive media environments in the world, Gerry Jackson founded SW Radio Africa located in the UK and broadcasting to Zimbabwe on shortwave. The signal is jammed in urban areas (thanks to Chinese technology, according to Jackson), but gets through to rural zones. The station also streams it programming on the internet and podcasts ara available to the very few connected to the internet from Zimbabwe, but increasingly important are the headlines sent to phones in Zimbabwe using SMS. According to Jackson:

Currently we’re most excited about our latest endeavour – sending SMS news headlines into Zimbabwe, via mobile phones. We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway – so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective… because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers.

Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect. We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly.(6)

During natural disasters SMS and radio have been used to provide emergency communication, for example an earthquake Yogyakarta and Central Java in Indonesia  killed more than 5,000 people and displaced 1.6 million in May 2006. With support from Internews, a U.S.-based NGO, a radio station and SMS text messaging provided news about relief efforts.

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.(7)

Some stations have incorporated SMS polling into their programming. During Kenya’s 2007 elections a local radio and television stations and newspapers used SMS to poll listeners on a number of questions. While the  results of the polls were posted on a website and discussed in the local media, the questions were designed to provoke debate about democracy rather than to measure public opinion. Examples included: “Have politicians done enough to fight corruption and mismanagment of public resources?”, “Do you think special seats should be created for women in parliament?”, “Does party politics foster national unity?” and “Do you feel your vote has the power to make a difference?”.

A new project in Grahamstown, South Africa proposes to use SMS to create a network of citizen journalists for a local newspaper. Eighty high school journalists trained as citizen journalists will send their news and views via SMS messages. A selection of the messages will be printed in the newspaper while others will be redistributed via SMS to community members. The project coordinator admits that it will be difficult to fit the news into the 160 characters that an SMS message can have, but they are already thinking of how to overcome the problem.

In the future, Berger hopes that the program will expand and possibly include other technologies like MMS (multimedia) messages. “We want to interface with the newspaper website, and we’re developing open source software to link the two,” he said. Berger said that there would also be research into the effectiveness of the project. “Then we’re also going to research next year the significance of this whole project,” he said. “Is it making a difference? What does it mean for democracy to have a lot of citizen journalism and to have young people contributing to the public opinion?”(8)

Projects combining SMS and radio have been enabled by the rapid takeup of mobile phones. Globally there is one mobile phone for every two people and in many countries of Latin America the majority of poor people now have access to a mobile telephone.(9) Internet connections and fixed line telephones are still out of reach for much of the world’s population, but mobile telephones have spread faster than any other communication technology in history.

“The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.”(10)

A study of mobile telephone use by people from low-income households in seven Latin American and Caribbean countries indicates high level of SMS by the region’s poor, apparently attracted to the technology because of its low-cost.(11)

Lessons learned?

We have not independently evaluated the experiences presented here, relying instead on accounts gathered from various media accounts and websites. As a result we are unable to clearly identify many of the enabling aspects or problems encountered. Certainly the rapid expansion of mobile telephony, the low cost of SMS messages and the aspirations of community radio stations to be accessible and participatory are important factors for enabling SMS messages for encouraging community participation and feedback.

The real question is not what has enabled the projects described here, but why are more community radio stations not making active use of SMS to communicate with their listeners? Certainly the very rapid take up of mobile telephony is one reason. In many countries the number of users has doubled over the past two years or so and it is understanable that radio stations will take some time to devise strategies for using the technology. Other reasons could include the limitations of 160 characters per message and users who do not know how to use SMS.(12)

While there has been some spontaneous use of SMS messages as a way of facilitiating communication with listeners and community members, more complex projects using SMS servers and applications have generally emerged as a response to political crises or natural disasters. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.

A joint research project of AMARC’s Latin America and Caribbean region and ALER, will establish “labs” to experiment with the use of various ICTs in community radio stations in Latin America. Including advanced SMS servers and services in the package of options offered by the labs should provide some information about the appropriateness and potential of this technology for the region’s community media.

Bruce Girard
July 2008
If you know about or are involved in an SMS/community media project, please tell us about it as a reply to this post or by email.  blog2[at]comunica[dot]org

Footnotes

1. http://www.portioresearch.com/Mob_Mess_Fut_brochure.pdf
2. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0309/msg00107.html
3. http://frontlinesms.com
4. MobileActive has evaluated some of these tools and their use in campaigns http://mobileactive.org/wiki/Desktop_SMS_Campaign_Tools. Also see their comparison of various tools at http://mobileactive.org/wiki/SMS_Tool_Comparison_Matrix
5. Ethan Zukerman, Mobile Phones and Social Activism: Why cell phones may be the most important technical innovation of the decade” http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=vastly+exceeds+internet+usage
6. Texting news to bypass censors, http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=142&Itemid=1
7. Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs http://mobileactive.org/files/MobilizingSocialChange_full.pdf
8. Local news with SMS http://mobileactive.org/spreading-news-sms-0
9. A study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
10. Ethan Zuckerman http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=%22vastly+exceeds+internet+usage%22
11. A DIRSI study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
12. The DIRSI study cited lack of knowledge as the main reason given by people when asked why they did not use SMS. According to the study, this is “not surprising given that most respondents are relatively new users (two years or less). In fact, our results suggest that adoption of services beyond voice increases over time, as users advance along the technical learning curve.”

The article provides an interesting case for why and how podcasting can contribute to development, but unfortunately we are still waiting for real world examples. The Peruvian project discussed, for example, was piloted in 2006 and doesn’t appear to have been active since then.

The national studies addressed a common set of topics, providing descriptions and analyses of country/case examples. The topics were:

• Participatory processes and volunteerism
• Relationship with the community
• Exertion of rights
• Accountability and good governance
• Community radio networks
• Financing and financial sustainability
• Community radio in conflict and post-conflict situations

The main report is by Bruce Girard of Fundación Comunica

The national studies were conducted by: Amparo Cadavid – Colombia, Martin Faye – Mali, Raghu Mainali – Nepal, Carlos Rivadeneyra – Peru, and Nkopane Maphiri, South Africa. The national are included as annexes in their original languages.

Download the main report (PDF)
Download the main report and the national studies (in their original languages, PDF, 2.4 meg)

The three projects have one thing in common — they see podcasts as first and foremost a way of distributing programming to radio stations for rebroadcast over the air, rather than to individuals with MP3 players, a strategy that surely helps them reach much larger audiences.

In Mali broadcasters search the internet to find answers to listeners’ questions, translate them to local languages, and encourage discussion and learning around issues of public interest. Without the internet Mali’s rural radio stations used a handful of old books and last week’s newspaper as main sources of information, but with access and training they are able to find information on the internet and help discover solutions to community problems. They are only able to do this because visionary policies and programmes enabled community radio and provided them with internet access and training.

Technological developments have often been favourable to community radio. In the 1940s the introduction of FM technology in the United States made community radio possible because it allowed for more stations at a time when the AM dial was already filling up in urban areas. A few decades later, in the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation of community broadcasters was able to get on the air thanks to technological advances that dramatically reduced the cost of transmitters and production equipment.

But it would be a mistake to think that these developments, and many others, were solely technology-driven.

In the case of FM radio in the United States, community broadcasters starting up in the latter part of the century were only be able to make use of FM because a visionary policy adopted in 1945 reserved 20 percent of the new FM frequencies for non-commercial and educational broadcasting. Without this policy commercial broadcasting would have quickly monopolized FM and the left of the dial (the reserved frequencies are from 87.9 MHz – 92 MHz) would have sounded pretty much like the right.

Similarly the low-cost equipment introduced later only became a factor after policies adopted at the national level in many countries recognised the importance of local and community broadcasting, established licensing frameworks to allow it and policy mechanisms to support communities in their efforts to get on the air.(1)

A few key actors in the development community also played a role in this by supporting the research and advocacy efforts of community media associations struggling to establish their place on national policy agendas and helping new stations acquire equipment and training.

Over the past fifteen years government and donor policies have supported the emergence of thousands of community radio stations worldwide. There are now 150 community radio stations in South Africa, 150 in Peru, 850 in Colombia, 120 in Mali, twenty in Nepal (with another 45 due to start broadcasting in 2007), to name just a few countries where community radio is flourishing.

The technological developments that have had the most impact on community radio in more recent years have not used broadcast technology but rather other ICTs, especially the internet, digital audio formats that can travel across it(2), and mobile telephony. These technologies have seen tremendous advances in both their accessibility and usability.

In 1996 when we started the Púlsar(3) news agency in Latin America only the most technologically advanced community radio stations in the region had access to the internet, and they mostly used it to exchange emails with donors in Europe or North America. Despite the scepticism of donors and traditional media, broadcasters scrambled to find a way to access the new service and before long Púlsar had 1,000 subscribers. Today the internet and mobile telephones are part of the basic toolkit for many community radio stations.

Mobile telephones are community radio’s remote broadcasting units. For a community radio news team they are as useful as television’s ENG(4) trucks, but they cost less than $100 and are so simple to use that community members with phones can become empowered correspondents, commentators, and critics.

A connection to the internet can be used in multiple ways by a station to provide a better service to its community. In the book The One to Watch(5) we identified a number of ways that community radio and the internet converge to exploit synergies and address the needs and problems of their communities in new and powerful ways.

In Indonesia an internet-based radio news and programme exchange network put the concerns of poor and remote communities on the national agenda and helped create a democratic culture after years of authoritarian rule and censorship.

A community radio station in Sri Lanka became a community multimedia centre when it decided to build an internet café to share its internet connection with the community.

In Ecuador and Spain community radio stations use the internet to co-produce programmes that keep Ecuadorian migrants in contact with their communities and expose money transfer companies charging excessive commission to transfer remittances.

Over the past decade the international community and national governments have invested tremendous effort and expense in ICT for development projects. There have been countless seminars, studies and statements; national ICT policies have been drafted, discarded and redrafted; bilateral cooperation agencies, UN agencies, the G8, and the World Bank and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) have spent many millions developing and implementing ICT4D policies and programmes.

Yet, despite the boom in community radio and the interest in ICTs, initiatives to link the two have been limited to the pilot projects of the type that have characterized ICT4D when what is needed are visionary policies and initiatives of the type that led to the emergence of community radio. These might include:

1) Support the growth of the community radio sector. A community radio station can be built and equipped for less than the cost of a single tower of a single mobile telephone network but it enables a dimension of public communication that telephony and the internet cannot.

2) Include community radio in universal service policies. In poor and remote communities radio is often the only medium available and it serves multiple purposes as a mass medium, a public forum, an emergency warning system, a school, a community telephone, and a primary point of contact with the rest of the country and the world. The action plan agreed at WSIS calls for all communities to have access to radio by 2015. To meet this target community radio will need to be included in universal service policies and be given access to the universal service funds usually reserved for telecom infrastructure development.

3) Community radio stations in poor and remote communities must have affordable and effective access to the internet. Achieving maximum impact with limited internet connectivity within such communities can best be accomplished by situating connections within the local community radio station, since the multiplier effect that the station can provide ensures that the benefits are felt in each household in the community.

4) Support the development of community triple play in under-served rural communities. Community-driven solutions are emerging in many parts of the world designed to extend networks to communities bypassed by traditional telecommunication networks and provide ICT services that meet the specific needs of poor and rural communities. In conjunction with community radio these networks and service providers can offer community triple play, locally-owned and managed operations providing radio, internet access, and voice over IP telephony. Evidence shows that when regulatory and other hurdles are removed, business models emerge that provide sustainable modern communication capabilities to poor and remote communities.

In The One to Watch I wrote:

It has been said that the internet is a window to the world — offering a view that encompasses a wealth of knowledge and information. Local radio is a mirror that reflects a community’s own knowledge and experience back at it. The convergence of the two just might offer us the most effective avenue we have yet known to combine research and reflection in order to harness knowledge for democratic and sustainable development.(6)

Four years have passed and we have yet to move much beyond anecdotes and the pilot projects. Only with vision and with policies such as the ones mentioned above will we be able to realise the potential offered by community radio and ICTs. It is time to move beyond watching the marvels of new ICTs and the potential they offer to people living in poverty when combined with community radio. It is time to get serious by becoming more strategic about putting in place policies and measures that genuinely release the energy of an ICT enabled community media sector.

Notes

(1) Government support takes many forms including making public funds available, but also simplifying the process of getting a licence. As long as frequencies are available, rural communities in Mali, for example, can get a community radio station licence by filling out a simple form.
(2) E.g. MP3, Realaudio, and the open source Ogg format.
(3) The Agencia Informativa P?lsar was the first major international initiative use the internet as a platform for a daily radio news service. www.agenciapulsar.org.
(4) Electronic News Gathering units, a crew and an equipped truck, send sound live sound and images back to the main studio for rebroadcast.
(5) The One to Watch: Radio, new ICTs and interactivity, Bruce Girard (ed), FAO, Rome 2003. Available online at www.comunica.org/1-2-watch.
(6) Ibid. p. 23