At 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.
Tag Archive for 'rural'
I got a CD in the mail yesterday with the final report from the World Electronic Media Forum (WEMF III) that was held in Kuala Lumpur last December. I was invited to speak in a session on Role of ‘own-time media’/’any place media’ in the service of development. The session was chaired by Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information and the panelists were: Lucy Hooberman, Innovation Executive, Research and Innovation, BBC Future Media and technology; Seema B. Nair, Project Leader UNESCO India; Bruce Girard, Expert in community radio and local media, Comunica; and Kristine Pearson, Chief Executive, Freeplay Foundation.
The session report and a few photos that were included on the CD are below, along with a link to the full WEMF III report.
Continue reading ‘World Electronic Media Forum - own time / any place media’
UNESCO and Jamaica’s Container Project have launched a community multimedia centre (CMC) constructed in a wheeled garbage bin. The bin houses laptop computers, a radio transmitter, wireless internet and other peripherals. The bin will travel around Jamaica and be used to give creative multimedia workshops to inner-city, rural and otherwise marginalised communities.
The Container Project is an innovative, arts-driven engine for community empowerment through creativity. It is based in a bright yellow converted shipping container in the heart of Palmers Cross, a rural community noted for its poverty and associated social problems.
Continue reading ‘Mobile community multimedia in a trash bin’
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.
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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