Creative Radio for Development
by Gordon Adam
For four days in May ( 1996 ), radio broadcasters from twenty countries gathered in Birmingham, England, to examine how radio can be used more extensively in humanitarian crises throughout the world. Entitled "Creative Radio for Development." the conference was concerned not with radio's reporting role, but with its ability to convey life giving basic educational skills such as child health, farming, coping with environmental and human disasters.
The participants were united in believing that radio has great potential in this field , and they started making plans to campaign for its greater use worldwide. In the following articles, CROSSLINES looks at some of the issues raised in the Conference. First, Gordon Adam, deputy editor of CROSSLINES and coordinator of the Conference, considers its outcome and how the "creative radio" initiative can be carried forward.
The premise for the "Creative Radio for Development " conference was that the aid community has largely ignored radio as a means of reaching millions of the most disadvantaged people on earth, despite its unrivalled reach and its cost effectiveness. This is against a background of greatly increased numbers of people being faced with humanitarian crises and needing access to impartial information, a rise from 11 to 75 million people in the past 30 years, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.The conference heard a number of case studies which proved beyond doubt that high quality radio could have a remarkable educational impact. But often where radio is being used in developing countries, it is not educationally effective because of poor programmes or lack of resources. An additional problem is that the few radio practitioners who are making original programming are usually working in isolation, and to some extent re-inventing the wheel in their individual attempts to overcome common difficulties.
Gathering together eighty broadcasters from 20 countries in one place for four days had the benefit of defining at least some of the problems, and coming up with potential solutions. The timing, it seems, was right: in the words of Britain's Minister for Overseas Development, Baroness Linda Chalker, in her address to participants and funders, it was "a nettle which needed to be grasped." Lady Chalker is not alone in thinking that the malevolent use of radio in Rwanda "helped to bring into sharper focus" the possibilities of a more positive use for this medium.
She stressed that in future "we must make sure the positive is in action before the negative." That is an ambitious objective, but one which Britain's Overseas Development Agency (ODA) seems to be backing, with a strong hint from the Minister that a Media Adviser would shortly be appointed to help coordinate best practice in development communications projects.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has similarly indicated that it will be formulating a radio communications strategy following a hearing of the Senate African Affairs Sub committee, at which the pro-active use of radio programming for development was scrutinised. Two major international broadcasters, the Voice of America and the BBC World Service, are laying new emphasis on their educational, as opposed to their traditional news and current affairs, role.
What's now needed are better communications between development radio practitioners, more advocacy for radio's use amongst funders and aid policy makers, and an initiative on training radio professionals both in the North and the South in the specific skills needed in creative radio for development. In addition, it is clear that there is a special role for radio in conflict areas, both as a provider of basic education and as a means of promoting peace building.
A significant step in improving networking has been taken with the Internet mailing list for radio practitioners being set up under the umbrella of the International Centre for Humanitarian Reporting (ICHR) as part of a new project to be known as the Radio Partnership. The mailing list should prove to be a valuable tool for collecting information on best practice, which will be fed into advocacy efforts to promote the use of radio in this field.
Funders, however, tend to be convinced only by results: a start was made in the Conference presentation to Lady Chalker, where a number of successful projects were summarized; to take just three contrasting examples:
In Kenya, the Johns Hopkins Centre for Communications Programmes' AIDS awareness broadcast "The Youth Variety Show", resulted a shift of 39 percent to 71 percent of young people attending the sexually transmitted diseases (STD) clinics saying they came after hearing the show.
In Mali, a pilot project by Cranfield University's Disaster Preparedness Centre working with an Oxfam-funded local radio station "Daande Dwentza," concentrated on informing villagers how best to protect the young shoots of naturally regenerating trees. After the programmes, 42 percent of villagers asked were marking the shoots in the recommended way, compared with just 6 percent before the broadcasts.
In Afghanistan, the BBC Afghan Education Drama Project's three times weekly radio soap opera "New Home New Life", is followed by millions of listeners, mostly women, children and young men. It seems able to influence women's understanding of vital life-skills, which is of particular value as women in Afghanistan, as in many other developing countries, are difficult to reach. One example: the need to give new-born calves their mothers' colostrum -- understanding of this rose threefold as a result of listening to "New Home New Life".
Underpinning these, and most other success stories, is painstaking research of the issues prior to the broadcasts among the target audience. The use of participatory research techniques to discover the listeners' agenda -- what their major problems are in everyday life -- is the key to producing programmes which are lively and relevant. People listen to the programmes, remember them, discuss them and perhaps even act on them, making them an educational "success."
But there are difficulties in defining "success." In radio-led development communications: should this be simply a calculation of the numbers of people whose behaviour has changed due to the broadcasts, or some wider definition? Proving behavioural change as a result of radio listening is often not possible.
A conference working group provided a helpful starting point for a wider definition of "success": that impact could occur at any stage in the broadcasting process from research and pre-testing through to training, interviewing and intersectoral collaboration. One example of this is the partnership with the British NGO Health Unlimited who sponsored the conference and runs a media-led health education project in Cambodia. The emphasis here is on-the-job training with a core group of local broadcasters.
These difficulties are particularly acute in conflict areas where radio has a proven role in providing essential health and other humanitarian information, as Radio Agatashya has shown in Rwanda. This Swiss-managed radio station was set up in August 1994 within six weeks of the Rwanda crisis unfolding, and with UNHCR funding it continues to use accurate reporting to combat the partisan information of other local broadcasters.
A related challenge is to provide effective programming for conflict resolution. The BBC Afghan Education Drama Project has just held a workshop with a British conflict resolution NGO "Finding Common Ground" to plan the integration of a conflict resolution storyline into the "New Home New Life" soap opera. Among the themes for inclusion are outsiders profiting from in-fighting, the role of women as peace makers, and the frustrations of the stop-start process which frequently characterizes mediation attempts.
As Clare Pointon discusses in her article on page 33, Paul Richards' idea of emphasising "smart relief" rather than "bulk relief" evoked great interest both at the conference and subsequently. His argument is that radio programming is -- or should aspire to be -- fair and all-inclusive: access to radios is very considerable in the developing world, with an estimated 53 million sets around.
Bulk relief such as food is, of course, essential in emergencies, but its long-term provision distorts the market and frequently causes conflict because it is exclusive -- some communities are perceived to benefit at the expense of others. Appropriate radio programming could, by countering rumour, help reduce tensions and foster reconciliation.
For some journalists, this emerging role for radio in humanitarian crises poses ethical problems. What is the dividing line between enhancing listeners' choices and supplying propaganda? This is discussed further by Loretta Hieber. The arguments are likely to continue, and it is right they should. But what is emerging is the great potential role for radio in humanitarian crises, a growing willingness by international broadcasters and aid agencies to explore the possibilities.
This is a task in which the ICHR, with its new Radio Partnership, plans to be closely involved. After all, ICHR was set up to facilitate the responsible coverage of humanitarian and development stories. The concept of promoting the creative use of the media on behalf of those living in areas of humanitarian crisis, is the other side of the coin, and it lies at the heart of the ICHR Radio Partnership's mission.
Source: Gordon Adam, 'Crosslines', Volume 4(3) July, 1996
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