Community Radio – For Empowerment and Impact
By Birgitte Jallov
While communication for development activities are presently being carried out all over the world and included increasingly in general development planning, much still needs to be done in terms of systematically assessing the basics in order to ensure that these efforts are truly sustainable and contributing effectively to longer term community empowerment and social change.
Communication is still extensively used just to market ideas, maintaining communities in their role as objects of development processes designed and decided upon by others, or developed within such a squeezed time frame that either the funder will be disappointed by limited results, compared to what was envisaged, or where the parties may actually manage to squeeze through all originally foreseen to happen, but with very little chance for longer-term sustainability and success.
In order to strategically succeed in calling the attention of funders and development planners to the framework needed for the inclusion of sustainable and truly empowering communication activities in any overall development planning, it is necessary to present compelling evidence that these actually make a difference, that they are and need to be an integral component of any results based development planning and management. For this purpose effective and realistic methods need to be developed and advocated for.
In light of the above mentioned urgent strategic challenge for the development community, the present article presents a concrete case where development of community radios in one of the world’s poorest countries has strived to meet this challenge by on the one hand working to use existing experience and develop community radios through a slow, highly participatory process and on the other to develop and implement a set of simple “bare foot” impact assessment techniques, being brought to use as an interactive tool to report back on process results to both producers, community, partners and funders.
Creating and measuring results where most needed – and oftentimes against all odds…
The present case is set in post conflict Mozambique. After some almost 30 years of war: partly liberation war, partly externally imposed civil war, much destruction was the result. Destruction of infrastructure, of systems and organisations, such as education and health, and serious damage to the social tissue, oftentimes found unfit to ensure continuity and survival via the socio-cultural framework and traditions. With the signing of the peace accord in 1992 and preparing for the first multi-party elections in 1994, frustration and disbelief in the future, in donor-promises and in each other, was the mental climate. Very little local development initiative was subsequently seen and very few local NGOs or CBOs were active and dynamic.
In this climate one of the many development interventions carried out was a major media development project, aimed at “strengthening democracy and governance through development of the media”. While working to facilitate development of enhanced diversity, pluralism, independence, decentralisation and de-concentration of the professional media, high on the agenda was the parallel need to ensure effective use of the community radio part of the project at the service of the communities marked by the post conflict syndromes. The project as such aimed at reaching broadly in its support to establish the basics for development of a democratic culture and implementation of good governance structures: reaching for improved service of the small, but important newspaper reading urban elite, as well as the grassroot reality, primarily in the rural areas and smaller towns via community radio.
Looking here to explore ways of creating empowerment and development of a democratic culture via community radio – the Mozambique project set itself as the important overall objective, to be able, by the end of the project, to measure that actual positive desired change had taken place in the eight partner communities, and to have ensured that these social change mechanisms were set within sustainable entities – community radios.
With these ambitious objectives, a series of important obstacles immediately surfaced: “Community radio” by nature is something that emerges from within the community and which couldn’t and shouldn’t be imposed from above. Further challenges identified were how to how to create sustainable community organisms with very little relevant experience available locally? And how to create adequate solutions with practically no local resources: technical, human, financial present? Further, how would it be possible to measure impact & ensure effective content in the given reality, and how would the project succeed in insisting on independence when only state entities could get sending licences? And finally, in this reality, where the project to a large extend had to start from scratch, how would it be possible to effectively prepare for a “post project” period when the donors would call a STOP to funding – avoiding disappointments.
A six year project implementation period has now passed, and it is time to – initially – take a look at methods and results of how adequate responses have been looked for in response to the challenges.
1. Is community radio an adequate medium for creating social change in Mozambique?
First of all the question would be whether community radio was an adequate medium for working to arrive at the set objectives? Looking at Mozambique with literacy rates of 59% for men and a low 29% for women (1997 census), knowing that only a quarter of the population speaks the only common language, Portuguese, at a level sufficient to follow and understand fully a radio broadcast news bulletin in that language, taking into consideration the vastness of the country and its many distinctly different languages and cultures – along with the oral communication being both traditional, familiar and effective, the answer to the question is, that community radio actually comes across as an even very appropriate potential medium for responding effectively to the development issues at stake.
Community radio being ideally seen to be an adequate medium, how could the obstacles posed be overcome? The present article will attempt to answer this question, and at the same time discuss the potential replicability of some of the methods developed. This will be done by (i) first looking to the initial, basic process of turning the top-down process bottom-up through development of a strong community ownership, thereafter (ii) we will look to the creation of the framework needed to facilitate sustainability, including strategies and action in the area of training, technical sustainability and financial viability through partnerships[1]. On this basis the final examination, in response to the above described strategic development challenge: (iii) how do we ensure that the overall objective of positive and desired development change is taking place: we will look to how effective content can be developed, and the community impact of this measured?
Concluding, we will assess the initial likely effectiveness of the concepts, methods and techniques developed in the attainment of the overall objective: mending of the injured (post conflict) social tissue, success in promotion of social development change and thus, stronger, better functioning and empowered communities, enhanced citizenship and democratic involvement - and the sum of it all: better lives for the individuals living in the communities in question.
2. Inverting the Top-Down Process, Creating Community Ownership
Based on worldwide experience, it was agreed that the first basic necessity would be to find a way of inverting the project-inherent top-down process to become a community promoted development process, carried by a strong community ownership. It was believed that only when the community feels that “this is our station” to which we provide producers and stories, where we assist in overcoming financial problems, and where we prevent theft by all being alert and protective, only then would a station in rural Mozambique have a chance of survival. Creating this community ownership feeling takes time. Therefore it was decided to plan for a one to two year mobilisation and capacitation phase before arrival of the radio equipment, which would absorb all interest once in place.
In order to invert the creation basis, a social mobilisation process was designed, carefully identifying in each community the many sub-communities within, ensuring information to, dialogue with and mobilisation of all of these. The initial rounds of mobilisation culminated in the community electing a representative installation committee, ensuring credibility and the availability of sufficient capacity to drive the installation process.
As the Mozambican open and democratic media legislation did not at the time recognise “community media”, which could therefore not be applied for nor be granted a sending licence, a community association needed to be formed, which could be granted a license/sending permission and a frequency. The first organisational challenge for the station was as such to get all the prerequisites for approval of an association in place and get it to work, including ensuring a continued broad-based community representation in the management committee, ensuring the political level community ownership of the station. These political managing background groups are initially pivotal in ensuring a good entry into the community work by the handful of staff members, who are recruited to ensure the effective implementation of the community’s dreams and aspirations – and in turn managing the between 50 and 100 community volunteer producers. Mentoring, training, support and thorough and continued coaching of the staff members by the management committee background groups, is usually needed.
The community ownership furthermore requires a much wider community mobilisation of community programmers – the groups of some 50-100 persons, representing all the many “communities in the community”. To effectively mobilise, organise and train this “corps of community ownership” a “Process Coach Scheme” was developed, basing itself on recruitment of a part time community organiser. This Scheme has, over the years, proven a very effective means for ensuring a very wide and active, participating community feeling a real ownership.
Besides from these two primary and parallel processes – creation of the association and the process coach scheme - both pivotal in creating community ownership feeling, a number of other, very different measures have been carried out, in order to facilitate the community ownership: Effective enrolment, registration and documentation of memberships; a well thought out and strategic location of the future station; encouragement that the radios create a comfortable, community meeting area just outside of the station: a shady place selling tea and sodas with wooden pillars and grass roof; windows into the studios to facilitate the community’s demystification of the radio production process - just to mention a few of the many possible, adequate local means and ideas to give the radio a true community profile, facilitating the community’s ownership.
3. Creating Sustainability – the Basis for Development through Action and Change
Sustainability, which in short means that the community radio can continue its planned activities over an extended period, requires insightful awareness and a series of continued interventions, planned and implemented in an open dialogue with and response to the ever changing realities. Being able to continue planned activities over an extended period, include centrally social, institutional and financial aspects. While some of the social and institutional aspects are covered above as prerequisites for the creation of community ownership, others are specific and are generally covered within the areas of (i) Training, (ii) Technical sustainability and (iii) financial sustainability through partnerships. In the context of the Mozambican project, the case of this article, all of these three aspects were approached systematically:
Creating adequate training solutions
Starting a community radio can seem relatively simple, with the needed funds available and at least one dynamic core person involved. Even more so when also in rural Mozambique, communities met the project with clear community statements demonstrating the need for a radio station, explaining what the local problems were, sharing concrete examples of how a radio could help them overcome some of these. Being reconfirmed that people perfectly well know what their needs are, it is in the question of how to get there and how to ensure a sustainable continuity, which is where the community radio – and training in its use - comes in
In order to create their own radio stations, communities have to start from scratch in practically all areas: community radio management, organisational development, staff and volunteer management, administration and financial management including donor relations and fundraising, programming and programme format production including audience research and continued audience relations, not to mention technical operation and (preventive) management skills.
In all communities there are people who possess some of these skills, at times due to training and education, yet in most cases due to amply proven real life experience in making life work – too often under extremely adverse conditions. The challenge is to identify these people, ensure that they become involved in some way in the organisation in or around the radio, and to create a number of adequate ways to further strengthen this capacity and the many others that are needed.
Based on needs assessments carried out, the project designed a five-tier capacitation strategy[2] including the following components:
(i)A series of intensive 8-10 day training courses, including management (general management, financial administration, developing a partnership programme, fundraising, etc), programming (creative programming as well as thematical courses on special issues identified like health, culture, education, agriculture, women, children, human rights & elections, etc), audience research and technical courses (preventive maintenance, etc.)
(ii)A community training programme through process coaches. Initially local coaches working part time, every week during the two first years of mobilisation. Later this scheme was taken over by project employed coaches, working on and off, full time 2-4 weeks at a time in each community radio.
(iii)Exposure to related realities, including study trips to other community, commercial and public radio stations,
(iv)Management Seminars and Workshops, tailormade and ad hoc as per identified need. A structured series of partnership creation seminars and workshops has as such grown out of the partnership strategy as the most powerful way of coaching the stations into a continued and sustainable management mode, and finally
(v)Establishment of a ‘Training Station’ concept, where teams of up-starting radio stations can visit well functioning stations and through “shadowing” specific functions, get a good, organic, hands-on experience and grasp of how to make an everyday work.
Creating technically sound and sustainable responses
While the relevant and effective community content is the core of any Community Radio all over the world, nothing will get on air without the technical part being in place. In a country like Mozambique, the importance of this cannot be exaggerated. Through the initiation assessments many of the community radios already existing in Mozambique were off the air because of a combination of factors that surfaced due to insufficient technical planning. Such factors included inadequate technical overall configurations of the stations that were not geared to the specific local conditions but were provided as pre-prepared packages from different donors; inadequately prepared local staff without any particular (preventive) maintenance skills or routines; insufficient funds to cater for upcoming technical problems; and insufficient community mobilisation that would ensure community backing in times of trouble.
In an attempt to learn from these sad experiences in Mozambique and in its neighbouring countries, the project opted for a set of different conditions that had to be in place, in order to avoid repeating the worst of the existing past experiences[3]. These included:
(i) Technical policies in place: ensuring a high general level of sensitisation among community radio managers and programmers of the many preventive maintenance issues is the basis for sustainability in a community radio. Knowledge, clear management, attention and good regular routines are at the core here.
(ii) Appropriate configurations: quality and sturdiness, that equipment repair capacity is locally available, and when possible compatibility with other equipment within the region/country. Furthermore the size of the station and equipment components making up a community radio station will and should vary according to the framework and reality into which it is put.
(iii) Capacitation for a sound technical sustainability: knowing that a training course is often a good development intervention, but usually far from the most effective way of developing capacity and knowledge, a multi-step procedure was embarked upon (a) starting with a basic training course developing (as per the points above) the notion of importance of station policies and adequacy of technical configurations on the one hand, on the other learning concrete technical maintenance capacities. (b) Based on this it was decided that the highest level of ownership to the equipment by the technicians could be obtained by their own involvement in the gathering and building process of the technical components. The technicians of the stations therefore were invited to join the technicians of the equipment provider for the important pre-shipment assembly process in South Africa. (c) The following step was the post-installation training taking place on site with extended groups of technically involved community members under the leadership of the technician. Finally (d) the practical experience and the early reality confrontation by the technician of a station, now on air, was followed up by an advanced level of the preventive maintenance training course starting off this technical capacitation process.
Based on this early process of getting the technical sensitisation and capacitation of the stations in place, work was started to develop a national network of super technicians, which would – within the framework of a national community radio forum – continue the development of the capacities of the station technicians on the one hand – and on the other create and maintain a national network of “super”technicians, who could coach, back up and support the station technicians. The technical sustainability should be maintained by such a partly local, partly national construction.