Local & community broadcasting and new ICTs
Joseph 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.
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.
Ben Grubb sent me an article he wrote about the eTUKTUK for an upcoming issue of the Telecentre Magazine, published by telecentre.org. I won’t steal anyone’s thunder by posting it here, but he also included some interesting links to online videos. A tuk-tuk is a motorised rickshaw or three-wheeled motorcycle, a popular form of transport in much of South and South East Asia. An eTUKTUK is (you guessed it) a tuktuk equipped with a computer and an internet connection, and Kothmale Community Radio‘s eTUKTUK which is not only a mobile telecentre but also a mobile radio station (with it’s own low-power transmitter) and a remote broadcasting unit that send a signal via its CDMA connection back to Kotmale’s main transmitter for rebroadcast throughout the region.
Continue reading ‘eTUKTUK – taking Kothmale a little further’
Radio Fala Mulher (Women Speak) is a radio programme produced by CEMINA in Brazil since 1990. More recently the radio programme is also a website and the home of Cyberela, a project and network comprised of women and community leaders selected, trained and equipped to produce and exchange information with a gender perspective through community radio and the internet.
A paper by Carlos Rivadeneyra “Convergencia para el desarrollo: Radiodifusión comunitaria como estrategia para la inclusión digital” (in English “Convergence for development: Community radio as a digital inclusion strategy) has been recently released by APC. The paper is available in Spanish only.
The distinction between “new” and “old” technology is no longer significant in the current state of technology convergence. People from community radios and telecentres are working together for more democratic and participatory access to communication, specifically in rural and poor urban areas. This paper by Carlos Rivadeneyra provides conceptual tools to re-think, from this perspective, what we understand by information society.
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