Sandra Juárez, holding a microphone, rehearses together with two colleagues from Izcanal Radio and Television to record a programme. This station is the only community TV station in El Salvador, which can only be viewed by subscription, but that could change with the advent of the digital system in the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
NUEVA GRANADA, El Salvador, Feb 27 2017 (IPS)

The Izcanal Radio and Television set is simple and austere, but this TV station made history in El Salvador, being the first, and until now the only one, to make the leap from community radio to community TV channel, in 2006.

It has done this through a local cable TV station, not an open signal channel, but that could change very soon.

“Our greatest wish is to compete for Izcanal to have its frequency and broadcast on an open signal channel; that’s our dream,” said Wilfredo Hernández, news coordinator at the Izcanal station, which was born in February 1993 in Nueva Granada, a town in the eastern department of Usulután.

Izcanal’s signal reaches across this town to 35 surrounding municipalities, but to receive it you have to pay for cable TV service. “The right to freedom of expression has to do with access to different sources of information and spaces for participation, and when the media system is exclusive and corporate, there is no way to guarantee this right.” -- Leonel Herrera

Its programming is focused on showing positive developments and initiatives in the community, revolving around themes such as local development, women and gender, environment, a culture of peace and migration.

“The major media outlets don’t show the good things that are happening in the communities, we offer this option,” said Sandra Juárez, coordinator of programming and content, while she edited an audio file on a computer.

Hernández and Juárez hope that radio and television, which are currently dominated by private commercial stations, will become more open and democratic, but to achieve that the authorities would have to generate the appropriate conditions.

They told IPS that the legal and operational foundations are in place to open up to new alternative projects, which would lead to a strengthening of the freedom of expression.

The government of leftist President Salvador Sánchez Cerén has announced the launch of digital TV in 2018, a new technology which will optimise the bandwidth and could make way for new stations, especially community, public and academic stations, among others.

For the shift from analogue to digital, the authorities chose the ISDB-Tb model, known as the “Japanese-Brazilian” model, used throughout Latin America, except in Colombia and Panama.

Social organisations grouped together in the Network for the Protection of the Right to Communication (RedCo) are fighting for El Salvador’s General Superintendency of Electricity and Telecommunications (Siget), the regulator of the sector, to promote the incorporation of these new players in the TV frequencies and also to open spaces on the jam-packed radio spectrum.

The expansion of the radio spectrum gained momentum following the reform of the Telecommunications Law in May 2016, which acknowledges community and other non-profit stations, and established alternate mechanisms for them to participate in the allocation of frequencies, such as direct allocation and a tendering process.

Wilfredo Hernández, during the broadcast of one of the radio news programmes of Izcanal Radio and Television, a project that emerged in 2003 in Nueva Granada, in eastern El Salvador. The community station was the only one to expand towards a TV channel. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

When the 1980-1992 civil war ended, a score of community stations were operating, initially broadcasting without a license from private frequencies, which led to crackdowns by the police.

In 2008, they managed to secure, through third parties, an FM license, which they fractioned and divided into zones to broadcast their programming, although with interference.

For years they struggled for the elimination of the auction system, imposed by the now reformed 1997 Telecommunications Law, a scheme that prevented community stations from competing on an equal footing.

In 2015, the Supreme Court came down on their side, ruling that something other than the auction system should exist, to guarantee the participation of these actors, in response to appeals on the grounds of unconstitutionality filed by social organisations in 2012 and 2013 against this mechanism and other aspects of the law in force at the time.

The inclusion of these new players in radio and television would give the country’s media a more pluralistic and inclusive character, which would strengthen freedom of expression, said Leonel Herrera, head of the Association of Participatory Radios and Programmes of El Salvador (Arpas).

“The right to freedom of expression has to do with access to different sources of information and spaces for participation, and when the media system is exclusive and corporate, there is no way of guaranteeing this right,” Herrera told IPS.

But the idea of extending the allocation of frequencies faces heavy opposition from commercial radio stations, controlled by five corporate consortiums, which account for 92 per cent of the spectrum, according to Siget.

The segment for open TV is almost entirely in private hands, although of the 42 existing stations, seven are not commercial and are run by religious organisations, and two others are state-run.

Uncertain future

But the entry of new players, in radio as well as in television, cannot be taken for granted, and if the current system remains as it is, blocking the entry of other participants, the media will become even more concentrated in fewer hands, said Herrera.

In the case of television, the digital platform and its greater bandwidth would allow diversification, but Herrera argued that the existing license-holders intend to keep the extra bandwidth for their channels.

In radio, the panorama is even more complex, because the radio spectrum is full and the commercial consortiums refuse to give space to community stations, although there are proposals to divide the frequency bandwidth to double the space.

“Siget must comply and make room, otherwise the reform that acknowledges community radio stations will only remain on paper,” said Izcanal’s Hernández.

A request from IPS for an interview with the superintendent of the regulator, Blanca Coto, received no answer.

An opportunity for new licenses in radio could open this year, during the renewal of frequencies, a process which takes place every 20 years. Until the reform in 2016, they were automatically renewed, a mechanism which practically ensured the concessionaires a license for life..

Now they must meet requisites such as keeping up with payments, failing to commit serious infringements, and making proper use of the broadcast signal.

But RedCo argues that with these standards almost every station will manage to get its license renewed, and that other aspects should be taken into account, such as whether the license was originally obtained in a transparent, legal manner.

A report from the Presidential Secretariat of Participation, Transparency and Anti-corruption revealed in September 2016 that 60 per cent of the concessions granted before the 1997 Telecommunications Law have no paper trail to verify their allocation.

The then regulatory body used to grant frequencies as an award for political favours or to benefit relatives or friends of the right-wing National Republican Alliance (Arena), in power from 1989 to 2009.

If Siget includes this transparency factor proposed by the organisations that make up RedCo, some licenses may not be renewed, giving community stations a chance.

But even if community stations are granted radio and TV licenses, this would not be enough to bring about a more democratic media system. To do that, the state must back up these measures with public policies aimed at promoting and developing community radio, said the interviewees.

The RedCo organisations have submitted a Proposal for a Public Policy in Communications, to contribute to a debate that, in the end, should generate clear measures to democratise the media in El Salvador.

A group of girls attend a Shonglap session in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. The peer leader (left) is discussing adolescent legal rights. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
BHOLA, Bangladesh, Jul 9 2016 (IPS)

Four years ago, Farzana Aktar Ruma, now 18, was almost married off without her consent.

Her parents had settled on someone they considered a reasonably wealthy young man with a good family background, and did not want to miss the opportunity to wed their eldest daughter.

Farzana’s father, Mohammad Yusuf Ali, told IPS, “I thought it was a blessing when the proposal came to me from a family friend who said that the talented groom-to-be has his own business and ready home in the heart of a busy district town in Barisal, not far from where we live.”

No one defies Yusuf, an influential man in Char Nurul Amin village in Bhola, an island district in coastal Bangladesh, where most people depend on agriculture and fishing to make a living.

So, without consulting his daughter, Yusuf promised her as a bride and asked the family to prepare for the wedding."The power of knowledge is the key to success." -- Priyanka Rani Das, who quit school in 2012 due to extreme poverty but has since re-enrolled.

Farzana was only 14 years old and did not want to get married, but she didn’t know where to turn. Then Selina Aktar, who lives nearby, offered to help.

Aktar told IPS, “It was not surprising, but I was [still] shocked at how parents readily accept such marriage proposals without considering the age of their daughters.”

On the eve of the wedding, Aktar arranged a meeting with Farzana’s parents and asked them to call it off and let her stay in high school until she graduated.

Aktar is the facilitator of a seven-member Community Legal Services (CLS) organisation that advises students, parents and others on legal rights, including rights of adolescents.

“After several hours of discussions, we were able to convince Farzana’s parents that an educated girl was more precious than a girl thought to be a burden for her family at her early age,” Aktar said.

Abul Kaiser, a legal aid adviser with COAST, a leading NGO operating in the coastal regions of Bangladesh for more than three decades now, and whose work focuses mostly on social inequalities, told IPS, “The society is cursed with myths and most parents still biased on such medieval beliefs favour early marriage. A girl soon after her puberty is considered a burden to the family and parents look for opportunities to get rid her as soon as possible for so-called ‘protection’ of their daughters.”

To challenge the traditional beliefs that still haunt many communities in this modern age, COAST promotes informal learning through various programmes which they believe make a positive impact.

Executive Director Rezaul Karim Chowdhury told IPS, “The society needs to be empowered with information on the rights of such adolescent girls, and that is what we are facilitating. Most parents who may not have had opportunities of going to schools are expected to behave this way but our approach is to change this mindset so that a sense of acceptance exists.”

At Radio Meghna in south Bhola, Bangladesh, teenaged girls broadcast a programme aimed at preventing early marriage and staying in school. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Radio Meghna, a community radio with limited broadcast frequency operating since February 2015 in south Bhola’s Char Fassion, has been at the forefront of such advocacy programmes.

The station broadcasts targeted programmes focused on dispelling myths through informal learning programmes.

Fatema Aktar Champa, a producer at the radio station, told IPS, “We have a large audience and so we take the opportunity to educate adolescents and also their parents on merits and demerits of early marriage. On various occasions we invite experts almost every day to talk about reproductive health, adolescents’ legal rights, need for education and the values, social injustices and many more allied issues linked to challenges of adolescents.”

Unlike other community radio stations, Radio Meghna is completely run by a team of about 20 adolescent girls.

Khadiza Banu, one of the producers, told IPS, “There is a general feeling that the radio team at Meghna has a wide range of acceptance in the society. On many occasions we broadcast programmes just to build trust on parents’ decisions to prevent early marriage and allow continuing education.”

Education is key to development, and girl’s education is especially important since it is undermined by patriarchal cultural norms.

In Cox’s Bazar district, COAST has taken a different approach to empowering adolescent girls to demand their rights and offering livelihood opportunities.

Despite traditional beliefs that devalue girls’ education, especially in poor, rural areas, adolescent girls in many regions of Bangladesh are getting help from a programme called Shonglap – dialogue that calls for capacity building and developing occupational skills for marginalised groups in society.

Priyanka Rani Das, who quit school in 2012 due to extreme poverty, has joined Shonglap in South Delpara of Khurushkul in coastal Cox’s Bazar district.

Part of a group of 35 adolescent girls, Das, who lost her father in 2009, has been playing a leading role among the girls who meet six days a week in the Shonglap session held at a rented thatched home in a suburb of Delpara.

Shy and soft-spoken, Das told IPS, “I had to drop out of school because I was required to work as a domestic worker and support my family of six.”

A neighbour, Jahanara Begum, who had been attending informal classes at a Shonglap session nearby, convinced Das that completing her education would help her earn a much better living in the long run.

Das told IPS, “I realized that girls are behind and neglected in the man-dominated society because of our lack of knowledge. So I left the job and joined Shonglap where they have demonstrated that the power of knowledge is the key to success.”

Das is one of about 3,000 teenagers in Cox’s Bazaar who returned to school after taking basic refresher classes and life skills training like sewing, repairing electronic goods, rearing domestic animals, running small tea shops, pottery, wood works and other activities that generate income.

Jahangir Alam, programme manager of the Shonglap Programme of COAST that runs the programme in Cox’s Bazar told IPS, “Those who graduate are also supported with interest-free loans to start a business – and so far over 1,600 such girls are regular earning members supporting their families.”

Ruksana Aktar, peer leader of the group in Delpara, said, “Shonglap is basically a platform for less privileged adolescent girls to unite and gather strength through common dialogues. Such chemistry for 12 months gives them the moral strength to regain lost hopes.”

Mosammet Deena Islam, 17, comes from a family of cobblers and had never been to school. Islam always dreamt of pursuing an education but poverty prevented her from going to school, even though schooling is free in Bangladesh.

She joined Shonglap in Delpara and after a few months in the group, she enrolled in a state-run school where she now attends grade 9 classes.

Rashed K Chowdhury, executive director of Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), Bangladesh’s leading think-tank advocating for children’s education told IPS, “Educational exclusion for girls is a major problem, especially in socio-cultural context in Bangladesh. Girls are still married early despite stringent laws against such punishable acts.

“Adolescent girls are encouraged to stay home after puberty to ensure ‘security’ and the most common reason is girls are used as earning members to supplement family income.”

Chowdhury said, “I believe such an approach of building opportunities for youth entrepreneurship to poor girls (for income generating activities) who wish to continue education, can considerably change their lives.”

Shonglap, spread over 33 districts in Bangladesh through a network of over 4,600 such groups, aims to give voices to these neglected girls and enable them to negotiate their own rights for life.

The Shonglap programme is being implemented by COAST and other NGOs with funding from Stromme Foundation of Norway.

Radio Bundelkhand, based in central India, has about 250,000 listeners, of whom 99 percent are farmers. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
TIKAMGARH, India, Jun 19 2015 (IPS)

Eighty-year-old Chenabai Kushwaha sits on a charpoy under a neem tree in the village of Chitawar, located in the Tikamgarh district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, staring intently at a dictaphone.

“Please sing a song for us,” urges the woman holding the voice recorder. Kushwaha obliges with a melancholy tune about an eight-year-old girl begging her father not to give her away in marriage.

“The radio station is by, of and for the people of this region." -- Naheda Yusuf, head of Radio Bundelkhand
The melody melts into the summer air, and the motley crowd that has gathered around the tree falls silent.

“Thanks for so much for singing to ‘Radio Bundelkhand’,” says Ekta Kari, a reporter-producer at the community radio station based in this predominantly farming district, before switching off the device.

With a listenership of some 250,000 people spread across over a dozen villages in Bundelkhand, an agricultural region split between the states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, the station is lifting up some of India’s most beaten down communities by getting their voices out on the airwaves and bearing good tidings in a place long accustomed to nothing but bad news.

Endless hardships

Some 18.3 million people occupy this vast region. The majority of them are farmers, and the list of hardships they face on a daily basis is endless.

According to the Planning Commission of India, a loss of soil fertility caused by erratic weather, coupled with severe depletion of the groundwater table, has made life extremely hard for those who work the land.

Crop losses due to unseasonal rains and recurring heat waves have also become common over the last decade. Last year, a majority of farmers lost over half of their winter crop due to unexpected heavy rains.

Two out of every three farmers interviewed by IPS concurred that extreme weather has made farming, already a backbreaking occupation, something of a nightmare in these parts.

Recurring droughts between 2003 and 2010 forced many people to abandon traditional mixed cropping of millets and pulses and switch to mono-cultures like wheat, which require heavy inputs.

NGOs have also pointed to unequal land distribution policies in the region as a major cause of farmers’ strife, with millions of families unable to practice anything beyond very small-scale, subsistence agriculture given the paltry size of their plots.

Earlier this year, plagued by poor weather, miserable harvests and alleged apathy to their plight by both state and federal government bodies, scores of starving and debt-ridden farmers threw in the towel.

In the first two weeks of March, roughly a dozen farmers in Bundelkhand had committed suicide.

This follows a pattern in the region that speaks to the desperation these rural communities face – according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 3,000 farmers in Bundelkhand committed suicide between 1995 and 2012.

While this represents only a fraction of all suicides across the country’s agricultural belt, which is now approaching 300,000, Bundelkhand’s death toll is no trifling number.

Given this harsh reality, an outsider might find it hard to fathom how an intervention as simple as a community radio station could make a difference. But for the listeners who toil here daily, the radio has become something of a lifeline.

“Our station, our issues”

Naheda Yusuf, a senior programme manager at the Delhi-based media non-profit Development Alternatives, which helped launch Radio Bundelkhand back in 2008, tells IPS that 99 percent of the listeners are farmers.

Although the villages that make up the bulk of the audience lie in different states, they all fall into the larger Bundelkhand region and so share a distinct culture, traditions and dialect.

“The radio station is by, of and for the people of this region,” Yusuf explains. “It connects with them in their Bundeli dialect, and provides information on issues that concern them.”

Over 75 percent of the shows are dedicated to agricultural issues including farming techniques, pest control practices, market prices, weather forecasts, and climate change updates.

While some of the information is sourced daily from government agencies like the departments of agriculture and meteorology, most of it comes from six reporter-producers who interact directly with the community to gather news and views most relevant to their listeners.

Every day, each of them produces at least one live show, during which the audience is asked to call in with their questions and comments.

“It’s your show,” one commentator announces on the air, “so if you don’t share your opinions, we can’t get it right.”

One of the most popular shows on Radio Bundelkhand is ‘Shuv Kal’ meaning good tomorrow. Its central theme is climate change and its effect on the farming community.

One of the show’s two producers, Gauri Sharma, says they discuss water access, deforestation and solar energy. They also pay homage to the river Betwa, a tributary of the Yamuna that waters these lands, and encourages farmers not to waste the precious resource.

“We discuss planting trees around the farms, so excess water from irrigation pumps can be utilised,” Sharma tells IPS. “We also spread awareness about renewable energy.”

The response from the audience has been encouraging, she adds, especially among the youth who call and write in to share how the station has shaped their practices.

In one such letter, an 18-year-old farmer from the village of Tafarian shared that he had “planted 22 fruit trees around his farm, stopped using polythene and begun vermicomposting” as a result of listening to the show.

Portable, affordable, accessible

Another listener, Jayanti Bai of Vaswan village, says the radio station literally saved her entire crop. “The leaves of my okra plants were turning yellow,” she tells IPS. “Then I heard of a medicine on the radio, which I sprayed on the leaves – it saved me.”

She now wants to buy a radio for the entire community and tie it to a tree so the women in her neighbourhood can listen to it together. It will take some saving – the most popular device used here costs about 1,000 rupees (about 15 dollars) and that is more than she can afford in one go.

But in a region that experiences eight to 10 hours of power cuts a day, and where only 48 percent of the female population and just over 70 percent of the male population is literate, a radio is a far more viable option than a television, or newspapers.

Farmers also tell IPS a radio’s portability makes it a more attractive choice since it can be taken to “work” – meaning carried into the fields and played loud enough for workers to hear as they go about their tasks.

Because the station caters to a largely female audience, it tackles issues that are particularly relevant to women listeners. One of these is the question of suicide, which many women see as a male phenomenon.

“Have you ever heard of a woman farmer committing suicide?” asks 46-year-old Ramkumari Napet, of Baswan village. “It is because she thinks, ‘What will happen to my children when I am gone?’”

Women contend that men require more help in understanding their relationships both to themselves and their families. And indeed, the radio station is helping them determine these blurry lines.

“Last week an anonymous caller said his brother was thinking of committing suicide,” Sharma tells IPS. “He [the caller] said he was going to try to talk his brother out of it.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Community radio stations in Bangladesh provide newscasters the opportunity to discuss topics of relevance to rural women. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

Judging by how often they make headlines, one might be tempted to believe that women in Bangladesh don’t play a major role in this country’s affairs.

A recent media monitoring survey by the non-governmental organisation Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha (BNPS) revealed that out of 3,361 news items studied over a two-month period, “Only 16 percent of newspaper stories, 14 percent of television news [items], and 20 percent of radio news [items] considered women as subjects or interviewed them.”

“Most of our audience are poor and they either don’t have access to television or cannot read newspapers. So FM radio, available even on the cheapest mobile phone, has been very popular." -- Sharmin Sultana, a news anchor for Radio Pollikontho in northeastern Bangladesh
Fewer than eight percent of all the stories had women as the central focus. Of the few women who actually made an appearance on the TV screen, 97 percent were reading out the news, while just three percent fell into the category of ‘reporters’.

Only 0.03 percent of all bylined stories studied during that period carried a woman’s name.

The monitoring report found that even though more women appeared in photographs than men, they were quoted far fewer times, proving the old proverb that, in this country of 157 million people, women are still “seen and not heard.”

While these statistics might seem daunting, women across the country who are not content to sit by and wait for the situation to change have taken matters into their own hands. They are doing so by getting on the airwaves and using the radio as a tool to raise the voices of women and bring rural issues into the limelight.

Women comprise 49 percent of Bangladesh’s population. Like the vast majority of people here they are concentrated in rural areas, where 111.2 million people – or 72 percent of the population – live.

Their distance from policy-making urban centres casts a double cloak of invisibility over women: according to data gleaned from the BNPS study, a mere 12 percent of newspaper articles, seven percent of TV news items and just five percent of radio stories focused on rural or remote areas – even though urban areas cover just eight percent of this vast country’s landmass, and host just 28 percent of the population.

The absence of women and women’s issues in the media is a dangerous trend in a country that ranked 142^nd out of 187 states in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s most recent Gender Inequality Index (GII), making Bangladesh one of the worst performers in the Asia-Pacific region.

Yet, even this is not mentioned in the news: the BNPS study showed that less than one percent of over 3,000 news items surveyed made any mention of gender inequality, while only 11 news stories challenged prevailing gender stereotypes.

Given that Bangladesh has an extremely low literacy rate of 59 percent compared to the global average of 84.3 percent, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the importance of radio cannot be underestimated.

Even in a nation where 24 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, radio is a widespread, relatively affordable means of plugging into the world, and is extremely popular among the millions of rural families that comprise the bulk of this country.

Lifting the voices of rural women

Momena Ferdousi, a 24-year-old student hailing from Bangladesh’s northwestern Chapai Nawabganj District, is one of the country’s up-and-coming radio professionals.

More and more women in Bangladesh are turning to community radio as a means of spreading awareness on women’s issues. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

She is the senior programme producer for Radio Mahananda, a community radio station launched in 2011 that caters primarily to the thousands of farming families in this agricultural region that comprises part of the 7,780-square-km Barind Tract.

She tells IPS she would not be where she is today without the support and training she, and scores of other aspiring female radio workers, received from the Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication (BNNRC).

Fellowships and capacity-building initiatives sponsored by BNNRC have resulted in a flood of women filling the posts of producers, anchors, newscasters, reporters and station managers in 14 regional community radio stations around the country.

“The road to my employment was challenging,” Ferdousi explains, “but BNNRC saw the potential in me and [other] female journalists and I believe we have made substantial changes by addressing gaps in women’s right to information.”

Miles away, the confident voice of Sharmin Sultana on Radio Pollikontho, broadcast in the northeastern district of Moulvibazar, reaches roughly 400,000 people spread over a 17-km radius.

With five hours of daily programming that focus largely on issues relevant to rural women, Radio Pollikontho has filled a huge gap in this community.

“It is an amazing feeling to conduct a programme, interact live with guests and respond to our audience’s requests to discuss health, women’s rights, social injustice, education and agriculture,” Sultana tells IPS. “When we began we had only one programme on women’s issues, now we run five programmes weekly, exclusively dedicated to women.”

“Most of our audience are poor,” she explains, “and they either don’t have access to television or cannot read newspapers. So FM radio, available even on the cheapest mobile phone, has been very popular and the demand for interactive live programmes is increasing by the day.”

The difficulties facing women here in Bangladesh are legion.

Only 16.8 million women are employed in the formal sector, with the vast majority of them performing unpaid domestic labour on top of their duties in the farm or field.

A lack of financial independence makes them extremely vulnerable to domestic violence: a recent study by the deputy director of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) found that 87 percent of currently married women have experienced physical violence at the hands of their husbands, while 98 percent say they have been sexually ‘violated’ by their spouses at some point during marriage.

The survey also revealed that one-third of all married women faced ‘economic abuse’ – the forcible withholding of a partner’s financial assets for the purpose of maintaining financial dependence on the perpetrator of violence.

In 2011, 330 women were killed in dowry-related violence.

Other issues, like child marriage, also make pressing news bulletins for community radio stations directed at women: according to United Nations data, some 66 percent of Bangladeshi girls are married before their 18^th birthday.

The situation is bleak, but experts say that as women become educated and aware of their rights, the tide will inevitable turn for the better.

BNNRC Chief Executive Officer A H M Bazlur Rahman, who pioneered rural radio broadcasting efforts around the country, tells IPS, “Issues like budget allocation, lack of appropriate sanitation, violence against women, fighting corruption, [and] education for girls are [often] neglected by policy makers. But if we can give women a voice, these problems [will] gradually disappear.”

It remains to be seen whether or not more women’s voices on the air will uplift the half of Bangladesh’s population in need of empowerment. But every time a woman’s voice crackles to life on a radio show, it means one more woman out there is hearing her story, learning her rights and moving closer to equality.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Radio Totopo was founded in February 2006 in the Pescadores neighbourhood, the oldest and poorest part of the city of Juchitán in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. But the authorities closed it down in late March, even though Congress is debating a constitutional reform that would recognise community radio stations.

Residents of Pescadores say the radio station belongs to all the people. Totopo, like most community radio stations in Mexico, has no official licence, and 90 percent of its programming is transmitted in Diidxazá, the language of the Zapotec indigenous people.

In recent years, Radio Totopo has supported campesinos (peasants) and fisherfolk of the local Zapotec people, who call themselves Binnizá, in resisting a wind park that the Spanish company Gas Natural Fenosa is planning to install on communal lands on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Community radio stations in Mexico continue to fight for legal recognition. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

The indigenous Assembly of Peoples of the Isthmus in Defence of Land and Territory denounced that deception was used in the presentation of the project to the campesinos, some of whom, unable to speak Spanish and not provided with a translation, signed contracts to rent out their plots at a complete disadvantage, violating the right of native peoples to information and prior consultation.

For six months, Radio Totopo translated contracts into the Zapotec language, broadcast them and ran campaigns on the project – until Mar. 26, when state police dismantled the radio station, removed power and audio cables and took away the transmitter and a computer as part of an eviction action in the disputed area.

One of the radio station coordinators, Carlos Sánchez, sustained a broken arm during the operation and he is now in hiding to avoid detention. Mariano López Gómez, the leader of the movement opposing the wind parks, was held for several days, accused of extorting government officials.

This happened while Congress debates a complex constitutional reform on telecommunications, promised by President Enrique Peña Nieto as part of the multi-party Pact for Mexico, a response to longstanding demands from civil society groups fighting for the right to information.

“This initiative reflects many demands that society as a whole has made for three decades, especially to change the current model of concentration of broadcasting and telecommunications ownership, and its contents are largely a product of expert studies and social mobilisation,” said the Mexican Association for the Right to Information (AMEDI) after its presentation to parliament on Mar. 11.

Among other issues, AMEDI highlighted the need for constitutional recognition of community radio stations, which under the reform would be entitled to concessions for social purposes, and the state’s obligation to guarantee the right to freedom of expression for all existing broadcasters.

“Constitutional recognition is very important, it is not a minor point,” lawyer Gisela Martínez, of the Mexican chapter of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), told IPS. “If (community radio broadcasters) are not named (in the constitution) it is as if they did not exist; that is why we are fighting for recognition under the law, because they say we are illegal.”

Martínez said the telecommunications bill was only the first step in the ongoing construction of people’s effective right to have their own broadcasting media.

On Apr. 30 the senate passed the telecommunications reform bill, designed to boost competition. It has now gone to the 32 state parliaments. Since it is a constitutional amendment, it will have to be approved by a majority of 17 of the states in order to become law.

If this majority approval is not achieved, an extraordinary congressional period will be required, or the bill will be on hold until September, when regular parliamentary sessions are due to resume.

In any case, “the mother of all battles will be over the secondary regulations,” said Martínez, as there has already been a negative precedent with indigenous community radio stations.

“In 2006, a constitutional amendment allowed indigenous communities to have their own radio stations, but seven years later there are still no secondary regulations permitting native people to exercise that right,” she said.

In AMARC’s view, if the law is finally approved, the next battle will be to ensure that the radio stations are not subject to power restrictions; can sell advertising; and are not confined to a specific geographical area; and that 33 percent of the radio spectrum is reserved for community and indigenous broadcasters.

Other major issues will include transparency in the permitting process, as well as the definition of effective mechanisms to guarantee the economic survival of the radio stations, without jeopardising their autonomy and independence.

Not everyone is optimistic. In Oaxaca and many other places in the country, community radio stations have played an essential role in the struggle for territories and culture and against large development projects.

“That law is useless to us,” Óscar Ledima Santiago, another of the coordinators of Radio Totopo, told IPS by telephone.

“That whole debate is a lie, because the radio stations are being subjected to repression for defending people’s rights, and by the time the secondary regulations are passed, there won’t be any land left to fight for,” he said.

Radio Totopo has already been off the air since Mar. 26, nearly six weeks, and the confiscated equipment is valued at over 5,000 dollars. Local people have mounted roadblocks and barricades around the area where the wind park is planned to be built.

And this is not an isolated case. Two journalists from Radio Voces de los Pueblos (Voices of the Peoples) were detained for several hours together with two reporters from the national newspaper La Jornada on Mar. 21.

A few days later Filiberto Vicente of Radio Xadani reported he had received death threats, and finally Radio Huave, a pioneer among community radio stations on the Isthmus, had its transmission equipment stolen.

Each of these cases involved radio stations that supported indigenous people’s resistance to the construction of energy or mining megaprojects.

“We demand a thorough investigation of these attacks, and punishment of the officials and company owners linked to the violation of our right to information,” the Assembly of Peoples of the Isthmus in Defence of Land and Territory said in a communiqué.

A community radio station in Thailand is helping migrant workers access crucial information about their rights. Credit: Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
CHIANG MAI, Thailand, May 2 2013 (IPS)

At the age of 23, Gao travelled to Thailand to escape intense fighting in his native Shan State in the east of Myanmar (Burma) and possible recruitment into the Shah army.

“When I arrived in Bangkok, I started working in a garment factory. We didn’t have proper food. I was surviving on a handful of rice and a half packet of ramen noodles,” Gao told IPS.

The young boy soon fell very ill but could not afford to see a doctor. It was not until his co-workers pooled all their resources together and put him on a bus to the northern city of Chiang Mai that he managed to get a free consultation through a Shan temple.

Gao was one of the lucky ones. Isolated by language and ethnic barriers, most migrants in Thailand lead secluded lives, unable to access resources or information that would help them secure their basic rights – such as healthcare, minimum wage, or proper food – in a foreign land.

To fill the gap, a local organisation known as the Migrant Assistance Programme (MAP) has created community radio stations in Chiang Mai and Mae Sot, a town on the Thai-Burma border, which have opened the doors of communication for a silenced community.

“Most of the migrant workers in Thailand, especially from Myanmar, come from various ethnicities – including the Kayin, Kayah, Shan, Mon, Rawang, Bama and Tavoyan – and speak different languages, so (our work) is really about breaking the isolation that many face when they come to Thailand to work,” MAP Director Jackie Pollock told IPS.

The broadcasts go out in four different languages – Shan, Burmese, Thai and Northern Thai. Listeners phone in requests for their favourite songs, find out about MAP’s work or how to take advantage of current migration laws and policies.

Most of the listeners are migrant workers from Myranmar who often take up what are locally referred to as ‘3D’ jobs (dirty, dangerous and demanding), and end up working on construction sites, as domestic workers, in the agricultural and fishing industry and in garment and textile factories around the country.

Mae Sot, where one radio station is based, houses an entire industrial zone along the Thai-Burma border, where garment, textile and furniture factories swallow up scores of migrants the minute they cross the border in search of work.

Women comprise the bulk of the workers in this town and are subjected to extremely poor working conditions for far less than the minimum wage, which is currently ten dollars a day.

The radio station has penetrated this community, offering programmes on occupational health and safety, women’s rights and cultural issues.

“Last year, we did three trainings with migrants who were interested in being broadcasters, DJs or journalists,” Burmese migrant worker and MAP community broadcaster Lan Moon told IPS.

Originally from the south of Shan State in Myanmar, Lan Moon came to Thailand 25 years ago at the age of six with his aunt and grandmother to escape fighting between the Shan army and the Burmese government.

He believes that radio forms a kind of “lifeline” between workers who would otherwise live and labour alone and whole communities that can offer support and information or simply commiserate about long hours or reminisce about home.

According to Pollock, cultivating a community of listeners did not happen overnight. MAP spent many years conducting weekly visits to areas where migrants live and work to distribute information about health and childcare, and used word of mouth to keep migrants up to date with national policies that might affect their jobs.

Now, in addition to the radio stations, the organisation has created 19 spaces along the border specifically for women to come together. “They organise themselves, sometimes invite speakers or hold discussion groups,” Pollock added.

Currently there are an estimated 2.5 million migrant workers in Thailand. The vast majority originates from Myanmar due to confiscation of land, human rights abuses or a lack of jobs and economic opportunities back home.

Although Article 2.2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Thailand is a signatory, ensures the equality of rights between nationals and non-nationals, the majority of migrants here are subjected to poor working and living conditions, lower wages and long working hours.

Registered migrants are also eligible for state health insurance schemes and are technically allowed to avail themselves of state medical services for a low fee. However, for most foreign workers, language barriers and the constant threat of discrimination or deportation hinders access to even these most basic rights.

For people like Gao, MAP has not only been a source of relief in times of distress – providing meals, shelter and necessary documents — it has also provided him an alternate occupation.

Following a crackdown on migrants in Chiang Mai, Gao says he “started volunteering with MAP’s crisis support group”.

“We help migrants get to the hospital or gain access to health care. It’s really important that migrants are informed about how to access proper health care because if one’s health isn’t good then life isn’t good.”

(END)

Radio Mahananda, a local station, helps farming communities in Bangladesh to share research and best practices on crop production. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
CHAPAINAWABGANJ, Bangladesh, Feb 21 2013 (IPS)

The sun is just beginning its descent as a knot of farmers gathers around a small, portable radio in the grounds of the Nachol Pilot High School in Bangladesh’s northwestern Chapainawabganj district, about 300 kilometres from the capital, Dhaka.

The voices of Kauser Ali and Dhiren Karmakaur — two farmers from Nachol who are sitting in a studio about 15 kilometres away from the crowd of eager listeners – come in clearly on the airwaves, welcoming their remote audience to ‘Krishi O Jibon’ (Agriculture and Life), a daily programme on Radio Mahananda.

The anchor begins by playing a popular song known as Gambhira, a blend of folk music performed in the native dialect by local artistes, before launching the farmers into a discussion about a common problem among this community of roughly 5,000 agriculturalists: pest attacks on maize crops.

I had a pest attack in my mustard field two years ago. Last season I avoided that by seeking advice in advance from experts who discuss these problems live on the air.” - Habibur Rahman, a local farmer in Bangladesh.
“The feeling here is absolutely electric,” says the anchor, Selim Kabir, a local farmer who uses this radio show to promote crop production in Chapainawabganj.

“Gambhira enlightens farmers about various aspects of agriculture,” Kabir told IPS, “so, we chose to use it throughout our programme, which delivers important messages and hosts live discussions on best practices to solve farm-related problems.”

Radio Mahananda, launched last April, has today become an indispensable communication tool in an almost entirely agriculture-dependent region, where illiteracy rates are as high as 50 percent.

The long fingers of development have not yet reached this part of the country, hundreds of miles from Bangladesh’s bustling industrial centres, where there is little infrastructure and few plans to build any.

Chapainawabganj lies partially within the 7,780-square-kilometre Barind region, an arid expanse of land located in northwestern Bangladesh. Here, extreme weather brought on by climate change has made crop production a huge challenge.

Characterised by an exceptionally high population density, Barind is also forced to contend with severe drought in the summer months, inadequate rainfall during the monsoon season, excessive withdrawal and depletion of groundwater, gradual loss in soil moisture and progressive deforestation.

In a bid to confront these challenges, the government set up the Agriculture Information Service (AIS), which resulted in the establishment of over 1,000 farmers’ clubs – each with between 30 and 50 members — in all 64 districts, to facilitate regular exchanges of information about boosting crop production and adapting traditional growing and planting cycles to a changing climate.

A group of farmers in northwestern Bangladesh tune into ‘Agriculture and Life’, a radio show on farming. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

Now, with the help of Radio Mahananda, the government initiative is having an even greater impact.

The rural community station reaches a 17-kilometre radius and helps farmers share their own crop research with listeners and even invites farmers to participate in studio discussions on capacity development, cultivating improved varieties of seeds, promoting use of organic fertilisers, using less water for irrigation and improving yields.

Ahmed Moin, producer of the 30-minute-long Krishi O Jibon show, told IPS, “Over 60 percent of our programmes are focused on developing agriculture. We use the benefits of radio transmission to build awareness and overcome crop production crises.”

Earlier this year, in response to massive popular demand, Radio Mahananda introduced another special programme – ‘a masher krishi’, meaning ‘agriculture this month’, which focuses on cultivating seasonal crops.

“We have seven hours of daily programmes,” Hasib Hossain, chief executive officer of Radio Mahananda, told IPS, “and since Chapainawabganj is an important agricultural zone we design our programmes to maximise benefits to local farmers.”

Radio shows typically begin after three p.m. to enable farmers to gather together at the end of the workday and tune in live. The programmes are interspersed with useful tips on how to avoid pest attacks or use drought-resistant seeds.

Television is a rare luxury in this part of the country, and a high illiteracy rate among farmers makes it almost impossible to disseminate agriculture-related news and information in print – the radio shows offer an excellent alternative to farming communities, who can even tune in using their cell phones.

Habibur Rahman, a local farmer and regular listener from Delbari village, told IPS, “We certainly benefit from listening to the radio programmes. For instance, I had a pest attack in my mustard field two years ago. Last season I avoided that by seeking advice in advance from experts who discuss these problems live (on the air).”

Farmers are encouraged to participate and send queries directly to the radio office through phone calls or text messages.

There has been “huge enthusiasm among the farmers. Requests for advice keep pouring in and many have reported better grain harvests” after the radio prgrammes came into existence, according to Moin.

Mohammad Mosharaf Hossain, senior scientific officer of a local mango research institute, told IPS, “We… teamed up with Radio Mahananda recently to disseminate information on our research and received an unbelievable response.”

In 2013 alone the institute has developed four new varieties of sweet mango, popularised among the local farmers through radio programmes. Such information is crucial in Chapainawabganj, home to over 90 percent of Bangaldesh’s mango production, with hundreds of square kilometres dedicated to growing and harvesting the fruit.

“We participated in regular live discussions to inform and encourage mango farmers to use the new varieties of mango seeds known as BARI-6, 7, 8 and 9,” Hossain told IPS.

According to Enayet Khan, a local farmer, “Mahananda has united the local farmers and has played a huge role in contributing to boosting regional crop production.”

(END)

In Bangladesh, Amal Chandra Sarker shares farming experiences over community radio. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 12 2013 (IPS)

In 1983, producers of popular radio, alternative radio and educational radio convened in Montreal to define a new genre of radio: community radio. Those dialogues led to the formation of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC).

The ethos behind community radio, says Marcelo Solervicens, secretary-general of AMARC, is that it extends the public sphere to ordinary citizens, reducing the distance between those who speak and those who listen.

Through this service-oriented platform, community radio has empowered a variety of practitioners, ranging from farmers in rural villages, to university students and trade union workers.

“Community radio came from the need for people to express themselves at local (and national) levels… but from their own perspectives,” said Solervicens.

He cited the use of community radio by U.N. and civil society organisations in various aspects of development: by providing information for farmers facing climate change; by informing populations threatened by HIV AIDS; and by organising cholera-ridden communities in Haiti.

In the spirit of World Radio Day on Wednesday, Solervicens spoke with IPS correspondent George Gao. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: With all the communication platforms in the world today – television, newspaper, computers, etc. – what makes radio unique, and why has it stood the test of time?

A: The key element of radio is that it is the most accessible type of media. Calculations (show) that about 97 percent of people are using radio. Although nowadays there’s a discussion about what has become known as a convergence of different media, I think radio stands out in terms of carrying voice.

Radio (creates) a unique type of relationship between the speaker and the one who listens. That’s something very important.

Q: What is the philosophy behind community radio? How is it different than say commercial or public radio?

A: Community radio came from the need for people to express themselves at local levels, or even at the national level, but from their own perspectives. It creates a specific sector that is different from commercial and public radio, and completes the healthy media landscape – healthy in the sense that it completes it with ideas that come from the people themselves, their perspectives… and it may be diverse – in the sense that it will respond to the diversity of the communities inside.

Behind community radio sits this idea of extending the public sphere to people who are ordinary citizens, so that they can voice their opinions. In that regard, it becomes a specific media, totally different from the others.

I think this ethos of community radio is what makes (people) so passionate for it all over the world, and this has expanded… because it is ingrained in human nature, the factor of being able to speak in the public sphere. From this perspective, community radio reflects levels of democracy in a community.

Q: What is the role of community radio in development? How have international organisations, like the U.N., used community radio stations across the continents to promote development?

A: There have been studies that (highlight) the role of community radio in informing and also in organising the struggle against HIV AIDS… and this has been recognised by the U.N.

AMARC has worked with FAO for a long time so that local farmers can use radio to get information (about) crises of crops, temperature and weather conditions, and how to better confront (other) challenges (related) to climate change.

I would (note), with the U.N., the impact of community radio in safety management. We had a (productive) experience in this regard in Haiti, after the earthquake, in fighting cholera – giving information to how these types of problems that came after the earthquake could be confronted… So community radios worldwide are available readily when there is a catastrophe, as places of information for local people.

If we consider development as a complex and integrated type of work, community radio is recognised as a key component to achieving development objectives in every area, mainly as a mode to send facts.

There are people who find it very much difficult to confront development challenges when they don’t have information. I think community radio helps in showing that.

Q: Can you tell me about AMARC’s Women International Network and the Gender Policy for Community Radio?

A: AMARC created in 1992 the Women International Network, with a key objective of not only insuring that women has a place in community radio at all levels, but also to develop a gender programming strategy for community radio that contributes to eliminating stereotypes.

So it has three levels – one is the level of defending and promoting a gender policy for community radio… It’s the discourse of ‘what is the role of community radio in regards to gender (not only) within the radio stations, but also in society.’

Secondly, in terms of ensuring training and coalition building and activities being cleared and piloted between women and men… to ensure that there’s not only discourse, but also the practice of equality in gender when it comes to the organisation of activities or different works.

Finally, I would say, in terms of strategic planning… in terms of legislations, in terms of developing sustainability of community radio (and) in terms of the impact of community radio.

Q: What are some challenges around the world that prevent community radio stations from reaching their full potential?

A: There are practical difficulties and challenges because of the nature of the media (such as training community radio participants), but the key challenges that were analysed in our global evaluation that we did in 2006-2007 are the (challenges that come with) legislation.

Community radio exists today in more than 120 countries, but it’s level of recognition (varies) from one place to another. In some places, community radio has to work with “private” legislations, and has to pay fees that are similar to commercial radios. In other places, it is limited in its sustainability, because it cannot (develop) publicity, or it cannot develop social economy models, because it is not recognised in a specific sector in the legislation.

Excerpt:

Mario Martínez beginning broadcasts in the Radio Mangle studio in El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
JIQUILISCO, El Salvador, Jan 16 2013 (IPS)

For the first time in El Salvador, a community radio is broadcasting under its own licence. The struggle continues, however, for legislative change that will give these kinds of broadcasters more airspace.

After years of challenges, Radio Mangle finally began broadcasting this week to over 200 communities in the area known as Bajo Lempa, in the municipality of Jiquilisco, in the south of the province of Usulután.

“This is a historic moment, the result of years of hard work and social pressure,” radio presenter Mario Martínez, coordinator of the Mangle Association, which developed the project, told IPS. As of Jan. 14, the radio station is broadcasting on 106.1 FM from the community of Ciudad Romero, in the El Zamorán district of Jiquilisco.

In October, the state-run General Superintendence of Electricity and Telecommunications (SIGET) awarded this frequency to a public agency, which transferred it to Radio Mangle, making it the first community radio in the country to obtain a licence. Since then, the Mangle Association has been busy preparing for its maiden broadcast.

The emergence of community radios in El Salvador dates back to 1992, at the end of the 12-year civil war, when opportunities for sharing opinions and dissent opened up. But these radios have faced issues for lacking permits; some radio stations have been closed down and violently evicted from their premises by the police.

The Telecommunications Law of 1997 tacitly allows community radio stations to operate, but they must acquire their frequencies through public auctions, putting them at a disadvantage with respect to business media groups.

“It is one of the most anti-democratic and malicious laws ever approved in this country,” Leonel Herrera, head of the El Salvador Association of Participatory Radios and Programmes (ARPAS), told IPS.

Unable to afford individual frequencies, the 18 community radios belonging to ARPAS pooled their resources and with the help of international funding purchased the frequency 92.1 FM in 1998. They split it so that each radio station could broadcast in its specific location, but this method caused interference problems.

Since 2000, Radio Mangle has broadcast on the frequency of Radio Maya Visión, a station linked with the leftwing Farabundi Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the government party since 2009, when President Mauricio Funes took office. Funes was a popular television journalist who began his professional career in radio.

The Radio Mangle project was born as part of the early warning system promoted by the communities of Bajo Lempa, one of the country’s most vulnerable regions. Every rainy season, floods cause fatalities and crop losses and displace the population.

But interference prevented their broadcasts from working, and the radio shut down in 2010. The Mangle Association applied to SIGET for a broadcasting licence that same year, but the application was refused even though the frequency had not been offered at auction.

In 2011 the Association tried again to obtain 98.1 FM, but a commercial company won the auction with a bid of 20,000 dollars, Martínez told IPS during an interview at the radio station.

“Some people just wait for frequencies to be offered at auction, and then they show up,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time that they win a frequency and then do not use it. They do this just to block us,” he said.

In order to circumvent the auctions, Radio Mangle approached the Communications Secretariat of the Presidency, which in July 2012 asked SIGET for a frequency for official use. It then transferred the frequency to ARPAS, which handed it to the Mangle Association.

In August, ARPAS, the “José Simeón Cañas” Central American University (UCA) and the Foundation for Law Enforcement Studies (FESPAD) filed a constitutional appeal at the Supreme Court against several articles of the Telecommunications Law.

They requested that auctions be revoked as the only method of acquiring radio and television frequencies, claiming that the system violates constitutional principles such as equality under the law by not allowing community radios to compete equally with business groups for frequencies.

Other articles of the constitution that guarantee freedom of expression are also being breached when radio licences are blocked, they complained.

But commercial radios counter that if frequencies are allocated to community radios, interference from these would affect programmes on already established radios.

“I don’t understand why they want to do away with auctions, when there are no spare frequencies available on the spectrum; it’s a technical problem,” Ana María Urrutia, executive director of the Salvadoran Broadcasting Association (ASDER), told IPS.

ASDER represents over 210 commercial radios in El Salvador and as such defends the interests of commercial broadcasting.

Community radio stations point out that their main purpose is not to generate profits, and so there should be a different route for them to be granted licences.

ARPAS argues that if the frequency bandwidth were divided in two, with a reduction from 400 KHz to 200 KHz, there would be twice the space to allow room for new broadcasters.

But Urrutia disagreed, saying, “Dividing the bandwidth would mean repossessing some of the frequencies that are already occupied by owners, and that cannot be.”

SIGET Superintendent Luis Méndez did not respond to IPS’s request for a statement regarding this question.

In Martínez’s view, the broadcasting association’s refusal to share the spectrum with community radios is based on ideology rather than technical or commercial considerations. They do not want people voicing thoughts and discourse different from the dominant messages on commercial radios, which are mainly in the hands of business groups, he said.

In December, ARPAS, FESPAD and UCA jointly criticised SIGET for not including alternative media and community radios on a commission set up to determine how the Salvadoran frequency spectrum will be digitalised.

The organisations say that digitalising the spectrum is an opportunity to open up the space needed by community broadcasters, but worry that on the other hand it could strengthen business groups’ current domination of the spectrum.

“The debate on digitalisation is…essentially political, because it represents an opportunity to democratise access to the frequency spectrum, or the threat of greater concentration of media ownership,” the three organisations said in a statement.

Middle sign reads: "Community Radios Won't Be Shut Down!" Photo: M. Milfort/HGW

By Milo Milfort and Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Dec 10 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

A community radio station silenced by Haitian authorities is open again thanks to the mobilisation of other stations as well as organisations and associations both inside and outside of Haiti.

On Nov. 9, the state telecommunications agency – the Conseil National de Télécommunication or CONATEL – shut down Radio Voice of Claudy Museau (Vwa Klodi Mizo – RVKM), a radio station in the southern city of Les Cayes founded in 1996 by the Unified Popular Movement of Les Cayes (Mouvement Unité Populaire des Cayes – MUPAC).

RVKM is named after the high school teacher and democratic militant Claudy Museau who was killed during the bloody coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1994).

CONATEL authorities ordered police to seal off the station the day after President Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly visited Les Cayes, and came as Martelly is coming under increasing criticism across the country, with rights groups, students, professors and others organising strikes and roadblocks almost every week.

RVKM is known in the city and the region for its educational, cultural and political programmes and for providing space for programming and guests critical of the current government.

“Our governments always show they would like to control the community radios,” says Professor Ary Régis of the State University’s Faculty of Human Sciences.

The shutdown was strongly denounced by local and international organisations, and in a demonstration on Nov. 28. Dozens of members of community radio stations from across the country, joined by students and representatives of various organisations, filled the streets in front of the CONATEL and Ministry of Communication buildings.

Marchers carried posters with slogans like, “Community radios are the result of struggles by democratic and popular sectors! You can’t just shut them down!” and “Long live freedom of the press – NO to censorship!”

Haiti’s 1977 telecommunications law dates from the brutal days of the François Duvalier (“Papa Doc”) dictatorship and does not recognise community radios, even though there are some 40 across the country. A new law – prepared with help from the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters – has been ready since 2007, but so far parliamentarians have not considered it.

“CONATEL used a legal pretext to close VKM,” shouted Sony Estéus of a small institution that works with the stations, the Society for the Broadcasting of Social Communication (in Creole: Sosyete Animasyon Kominikasyon Sosyal – SAKS), into a megaphone during the Nov. 28 demonstration.

As marchers amassed in front of the Ministry of Communications, Minister Ady Jean Gardy invited representatives to an ad hoc meeting. That consultation, other negotiations and mounting pressure resulted in the re-opening of the radio on Dec. 1, and the decision that all community radios would be allowed to operate “until the publication of a law… thanks to an authorisation that will be published by CONATEL,” according to RVKM news director Jean Claudy Aristil.

“We are very pleased with the decision,” Aristil added. “This is an important step for freedom of the press in Haiti.”

Haiti’s community movement began in secret, during the 1991-1994 coup d’état regime. Pirate radio stations in the capital and a few timid beginnings in the countryside led to a flourishing movement in 1995.

With the help of equipment and training from SAKS and other groups, peasant, youth, labour and other organisations in Haiti’s democratic and popular movement founded stations across Haiti. Some have not survived due to financial challenges and to offensives from local politicians and foreign funders seeking to co-opt the stations.

But many – bearing names like “Radio Star of the Peasant,” “Radio Zèb Tenite” (named after a tenacious grass that survives droughts) and “Radio Working Together – are still on the air. In a country where most people get their news and information from the radio, and where a large percentage of the population lives in the countryside, community radios play many important roles.

“Haiti is dominated by economic and social problems, and by ‘communicational marginalisation,’” according to Professor Régis. “Community radios can help the country develop because they allow people to discuss problems, participate in debates and increase transparency.”

*RVKM is one of dozens of community radios across the country who partner with Haiti Grassroots Watch.

Donato Ayma in the Atipiri radio station booth. Credit: Franz Chávez /IPS

By Franz Chávez
EL ALTO, Bolivia, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

Every morning from 6:00 to 8:00 AM, native people in this sprawling working-class suburb of La Paz, Bolivia listen to the programme broadcast by former education minister Donato Ayma in the Aymara language.

He starts his programme every day on the local Atipiri radio station saying “Mä amuyuki, mä ch’amaki” (“with one single thought, one single force,” in Aymara).

In an interview with IPS, Ayma explains the importance of the radio to Bolivia’s predominantly indigenous rural highlands population.

Ayma, one of Bolivia’s best-known native broadcasters, says “the radio is still the most accessible and easily operated media” in this geographically diverse country of high mountains peaks, altiplano, valleys, lowlands and Amazon jungle.

He describes campesinos ploughing their steep fields in the bleak Andes highlands, where the ploughs are still pulled by oxen, accompanied by the songs on their portable radios.

“The young women prefer to hear programmes in their mother tongue – they’re bilingual, but they tend to choose music that reflects the thinking and experiences of their people,” he says, describing life in the highlands.

Electricity is often unavailable and newspapers rarely reach remote villages, where the radio is listened to “by illiterate people; people can listen to each other, using their ears.”

The Aymara academic and researcher describes his childhood in the frigid altiplano, in Toledo, a village in the western department or province of Oruro. That is where he began his career behind a microphone, in 1969, and began to develop what he calls a New Model of Communication (NUMOCOM) for Bolivia.

“I’m a radio aficionado,” he says enthusiastically, discussing his seven-month stint in the cabinet of President Carlos Mesa (2003-2005), his 15 years at the San Gabriel Radio station, and his experience now in Atapiri, a station launched to discover radio broadcasting talent among indigenous people.

Since 2006, Atipiri has been putting into practice the ideas of the Centre of Education and Communication for Indigenous Communities and Peoples, of which Ayma is a founder. Like the San Gabriel station, it broadcasts from El Alto, a city of one million in the highlands next to La Paz.

El Alto is home to many of the indigenous Bolivians who have come to La Paz, the seat of government, from rural villages.

Initiatives to keep native culture and values alive and to help indigenous people in rural areas integrate have, paradoxically, mushroomed in El Alto.

Ayma pointed out that in the 2001 census, 62 percent of the population of Bolivia identified themselves as indigenous.

That census not only asked people for the first time whether they saw themselves as belonging to an indigenous group, but it also found that the mother tongue of half of the population was an indigenous language.

Based on these and other figures, the National Statistics Institute estimates that 66 percent of the population has an indigenous “ethnolinguistic” origin.

The 2009 constitution declared Bolivia a “plurinational” state, with 36 different ethnolinguistic groups.

Ayma bases his new model of communication, NUMOCOM, on the concept of “community radio stations as instruments of communication and development” which offer programming that comes from “the deep roots of the people.”

The first commercial radio station in this country was Radio Nacional de Bolivia, which began to operate in March 1929. But broadcasting in the Aymara language – the most widely spoken indigenous tongue in Bolivia, after Quechua – only dates back to the 1960s, when a programme in that language was on the air from 5:00 to 7:00 AM.

Under the NUMOCOM model, experienced, university-educated journalists become communicators speaking in their mother tongues and producing programming tailored to their communities.

The reality these communicators address and reflect in the community radio stations is ignored by the mainstream press and broadcast media, Ayma said.

“The pages of any Latin American newspaper are full of news about the European royalty, their weddings, their pregnancies,” he says. “But we don’t see news from
Charaña (on the western border with Chile), the foothills of Anallajchi (a snow-capped mountain), the llama grazing areas, or the Amazon jungle.

“At this very moment, a herder is coming home thirsty after a long day of work, and he’s listening to us,” says Ayma, who adds that the herder complains that his life isn’t reflected in the media, which are dominated by the homogeneous popular entertainment programming of the transnational media corporations.

Ayma criticises the commercial radio stations of El Alto because they ignore traditional Bolivian Andean music, played with pan pipes, charango, guitar and drums, and only play cumbia combined with techno and rap.

He cited Bolivian journalist Luis Ramiro Beltrán, 1983 winner of the McLuhan Teleglobe Canada award for his theories on communication for development, which were predominant in Bolivia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Taking these theories as a basis, Ayma developed his NUMOCOM model of communication, incorporating other values like environmental conservation, preservation of Pachamama or Mother Earth, and the appropriate use of water for human consumption and irrigation.

He also urges people to fight the use of synthetic products that end up in garbage dumps or the water, and kill livestock.

Finally, he advocates horizontal communication, to be used in the organising and empowerment of communities, in which the communicators are part of the action.

He says, for example, that while vertical communication gives orders, like “sweep the streets,” horizontal communication gets the broadcaster involved, who joins in the task and says “let’s sweep the streets.”

Trifonia Tordoya, two of her daughters, and a granddaughter during their last programme on women’s politics and rights. Credit: Jenny Cartagena/IPS

By Jenny Cartagena Torrico
CLIZA, Bolivia , Nov 27 2012 (IPS)

“Atispa mana atispa ñawpajman rinanchis tiyan” (“Power without power, we have to keep moving forward”) in the Quechua language, Ruth Rojas told her listeners at the end of a series of radio programmes on political culture, broadcast to indigenous women in Bolivia.

From the small booth in the Ecológica community radio station in the town of Cliza, located in one of the highland valleys in the central department (region) of Cochabamba, an intergenerational group of four women and girls sparked debate and reflection on topics linked to politics and women’s and indigenous rights.

They discussed the exercise of democracy, social control, gender equality, legal questions and other issues, based on their experience as indigenous women in South America’s poorest country.

Other community radio stations are involved in similar work empowering people in the highland valleys of this mainly agricultural region on the eastern side of the Andes mountains.

Throughout the department of Cochabamba, women who have never taken a course in radio broadcasting are using the airwaves to inform, empower and raise awareness, and to work for change in their communities.

They know from experience that radio is the best way to reach women in their homes in remote rural villages, where television is an inconceivable luxury due to the lack of electricity, and newspapers are impossible to get because of the distances involved.

In Bolivia there is no official list of community radio stations or stations run by trade unions or peasant associations, because most of them have a very limited range and operate without a licence. But the estimate is that there are at least 2,000 community stations.

Their impact in rural areas and poor neighbourhoods surrounding towns and cities is indisputable, thanks to their programming in Quechua, Aymara or Guaraní, the three most widely spoken native languages in Bolivia, where more than 60 percent of the population of 10.6 million belong to one of 36 different indigenous groups.

In some of the areas, there are bilingual or even trilingual programmes.

The biggest network of community stations is that of Educación Radiofónica de Bolivia (Erbol), with ties to the Catholic Church, whose chief focus is improving social conditions through grassroots communication.

For 21 Sundays in a row, 63-year-old Trifonia Tordoya led a two-hour programme broadcast live in Quechua along with her daughters Ruth, 25, and Tania, 30, both of whom are schoolteachers, and her 13-year-old granddaughter Madeleine Pereira.

The name of the programme was itself a declaration of intentions: “Wakichikuy wasiyuj allin kawsayta tarinapaj” (“Get ready to live well”, in Quechua).

In the Ecológica radio station, Tordoya told IPS in Quechua that the programme, which had just ended, was the result of her concern about the participation of women in productive activities and decision-making in her village.

She and other local women leaders took part in the programme on “Political culture and cultural diversity: Empowering citizens in Quechua-speaking populations of Peru and Bolivia”, carried out in this country by the non-governmental organisation Ciudadanía: Comunidad de Estudios Sociales y Acción Pública (Citizenship: Community of Social Studies and Public Action).

The aim of the programme is to foster an intercultural political dialogue and strengthen democratic values among women, while tapping into the knowledge of indigenous women.

For three years, women leaders of 20 rural community organisations from Quechua-speaking areas in the highlands valleys of Cochabamba worked to build their own definitions and concepts of key rights and issues, drawing on their own life experiences.

In the end, they chose 19 elements, including democracy, legitimacy, autonomy, rights, gender violence, exclusion, discrimination, transparency, corruption and justice, the coordinator of the programme, Olivia Román, told IPS.

“We didn’t know what exclusion was,” Tordoya said. “We asked each other what was the meaning of that word, which doesn’t exist in Quechua. Later, all together, we came up with a definition for that concept.”

She attended the workshops with her granddaughter Madeleine, who at the time was 10 years old. Madeleine was there to take notes for her, because she reads and writes with difficulty, having only gone to school through fifth grade.

After Tordoya was abandoned by her husband, she raised her six children on her own, farming a small plot of land.

None of the definitions were easy. “We had heard these words in Spanish, but we didn’t know exactly what they meant. So we discussed and debated, and defined them in Quechua,” said Norah Claros, another participant in the workshops.

They decided to call gender “qhari-warmi” (man-woman), because a key principle in the Quechua culture is the complementarity and parity of opposites. And their definition of gender is: “Men and women have the same rights, capacities and way of life, choosing and being chosen, helping each other in work and in life.”

The next step was to get the word out to other women, and help them incorporate these definitions and concepts in their daily lives, because the participants reached the conclusion that unless women were aware of their meanings, the rights would be neither demanded nor practiced.

Some of the participants suggested producing radio programmes, and others suggested workshops, or short radio spots, or radio plays. Tordoya’s idea for a radio programme prospered with the support of Ciudadanía: Comunidad de Estudios Sociales y Acción Pública, and she decided to get her daughters and her oldest granddaughter involved.

The four women from Villa El Carmen, a rural community outside the town of Cliza, decided to discuss one concept each Sunday, in 15 shows. But the enthusiasm of their listeners prompted them to produce six more shows.

They told IPS that they achieved their objective: reaching the homes in the rural communities around Cliza, and urging the local authorities to guarantee the rights of women and the exercise of democracy.

“The audience grew as the programme went on, and the public participated a great deal by calling in over the telephone,” the owner and director of the radio station, Roger Araoz, told IPS. “So we expanded it to two hours and produced another set of episodes.”

“Listeners have been calling in and asking the women to continue, because they did such a good job explaining the rights of women, and expressing constructive criticism of the authorities,” he said.

The Ecológica station belongs to the Erbol network, and reaches the entire rural area of the highland valley around Cliza, the town where it is located, 37 km from the capital of Cochabamba.

“Señora Trifonia is well-known and respected,” said Araoz. “She has participated in other programmes, and she would come to the station to discuss problems facing the community. So when the opportunity for the programme came up, we did not hesitate to give her air time.”

Her daughters Tania and Ruth agree that the general view, which not only prevails in their community, is that women don’t know how to think for themselves and should not participate in politics or be involved in decision-making.

For that reason, they said, many people were surprised to hear three women and a young girl speaking so articulately about these issues on the radio.

Both of them said they were grateful that their mother got them involved in the programme, because it helped them learn about their rights and how to exercise them, which they weren’t that clear about before despite the fact that they are teachers.

And more importantly, they said, the programme helped many Quechua women learn that they have rights, and demand that they be respected in their homes, their communities, and society in general.

Madeleine Pereira said she tried to put everything she learned in the workshops and on the programme “in practice in school, and I teach my schoolmates that they have rights.”

A broadcast session at Radio DC, Thiruvananthapuram. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By IPS Correspondents
Mar 21 2012 (IPS)

The advent of mobile phones has given a fillip to CR because even the cheapest handsets come embedded with FM capability. But K.S. Hariskrishnan reports that red tape is still hampering the establishment of new community radio stations.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20120302_communityradio_harikrishnan.mp3[/podcast]

A broadcast session at Radio DC, Thiruvananthapuram. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India, Mar 21 2012 (IPS)

Security concerns appear to have stymied the growth of community radio (CR) in India, a vast and diverse country of 1.2 billion people, the bulk of them living in remote, rural areas.

“There are too many ministries and departments involved in the CR licensing process, and remote border states in the northeast adjacent to Burma have been left out, for example,” says Sajan Venniyoor, member of a government committee constituted to fund new stations.

Also left out are the Kashmir valley, racked by a separatist movement, and the largely tribal states of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh in central India that have been hit by Maoist insurgency.

Radio Ujjas, licensed to the non-profit Kutch Women’s Development Organisation, became India’s first CR station close to its international border when it started broadcasting on Mar. 10, 2012. Located in Gujarat’s Bhimsar village, close to the Pakistan border, it applied for a license five years ago.

Prof. Kanchan Malik, at the department of communication, University of Hyderabad, told IPS that the processes to set up CR stations should be simplified if they are to play their mandated role of empowering marginalised communities and helping conflict resolution.

“Cumbersome licensing processes, a ban on news programmes, lack of cost-effective technology, funding restrictions, inadequate capacity building and spectrum allocation delays or denials are some of the hurdles in the way of CR stations coming up,” she said.

The campaign to give space to CR in India – in addition to commercial and public broadcasting – began in earnest after the Supreme Court ruled in February 1995 that airwaves are public property and could not be government monopoly.

But, it was not until 2004 that India’s first CR could be launched, run by the Education and Multimedia Research Centre of Anna University in southern Chennai city.

The Information and Broadcasting (I&B) ministry has so far approved 363 proposals to set up CR stations in the country and, of these, 126 stations are operational.

Of those running, 76 are owned by colleges, institutes and other educational organisations, while only 36 are run by non-governmental organisations, showing limited civil society involvement.

Existing CR policy limits the award of licenses to not-for-profit organisations with a proven track record of community service and registered for not fewer than three years. Stringent restrictions have also been placed on fundraising.

CRs may operate a 100-watt radio station, with coverage limited to a 12-km radius and antenna height to 30 metres. Fifty percent of the programmes are expected to be produced locally and in the local language or dialect.

News programmes are banned, except items concerned with sports, traffic, weather conditions, cultural events and festivals, academic events, electricity and water supply, disaster warnings and health alerts.

Five minutes of advertising per hour are allowed, but CR programmes cannot be sponsored except by the government.

According to the ‘Compendium of Community Radio Stations in India’, published in 2011 by the New Delhi-based Commonwealth Education Media Centre for Asia in association with I&B ministry, restrictions on using high power equipment present a major difficulty.

Lack of training in handling equipment and creating programmes, inability to make strong content development, competition with mainstream commercial radio stations, limitation in airing advertisements and electricity failure are other hurdles, the compendium showed.

Activists say that women, tribal people, children, students, health workers and fishers could vastly benefit from CR, going by the experience of existing stations.

“With the arrival of CR, neglected groups have an opportunity for active participation in mainstream life,” says Chennai-based rights activist Mani Verma. “There has been, visibly, a revival of local culture and an increase in literacy rates.”

“For a thickly populated, predominantly rural country like India, reaching the masses and educating them is essential, and this can be achieved fastest by utilising CR effectively,” says P. Sajikumar, head of ‘Radio DC’ in Thiruvananthapuram.

A survey conducted by the DCSMAT School of Media and Business in this city found that there was a need to create awareness about CR and its capabilities. Often, the survey found, listeners failed to differentiate between CR and commercial radio.

“People tend to compare CR with commercial channels in every aspect,” the survey said. “Participation of listeners at every stage of production can be encouraged and importance given to young talent,” it suggested.

According to Venniyoor, the advent of mobile phones has given a fillip to CR because even the cheapest handsets come embedded with FM capability. “With digitisation, it may get even better. It will certainly get more interesting because of the explosive growth of mobile telephony.”

“Right now, however, we need to concentrate on getting licenses and setting up more stations,” Venniyoor said. “The government has promised support and we will just have to wait and see about actual implementation.”

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

By IPS Correspondents
Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

Podcast by Catherine Wilson on Bougainville’s New Dawn community radio station which broadcasts to to nearly 50,000 listeners in Papua New Guinea.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20120307_communityradio_wilson.mp3[/podcast]

By IPS Correspondents
Mar 6 2012 (IPS)

Nisaa FM is an almost entirely female-run Palestinian radio station based in Ramallah, West Bank and the only radio station in the Middle East devoted solely to women’s issues. Jillian Kestler-D’Amours asks director Maysoun Odeh Gangat what the radio station aims to achieve.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20120306_community_jillian.mp3[/podcast]

By Inés Acosta and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Uruguay took a giant step towards more democratic media when it passed a law on community radio broadcasting in 2007. But although regulations for the law were approved in late 2010, many broadcasters are now off the air and waiting to be assigned a frequency.

Community radio operator at La Cotorra. Credit: Courtesy of La Cotorra FM

“It establishes a community radio broadcasting sector which is assigned one-third of the radio spectrum in every frequency band,” he said. A draft decree on digital television being prepared by the government also “reserves one-third for community broadcasters.”

Martín Prats, head of the Honorary Advisory Council for Community Radio Broadcasting (CHARC) as the representative of the Ministry of Industry, told IPS the law “establishes a transparent process for assigning frequencies in different parts of the country, which is the stage we are at. It is a process that has just begun; the results will be more visible next year.”

Based on the law, a census was carried out in 2008 to assign frequencies to community radio stations that were already on the air. A total of 413 projects applied, but only 92 of them met the legal requirements.

This process ended in 2010, and it was only in 2011 that calls were opened for applications in different parts of the country to assign frequencies to radio stations that had not necessarily been on the air before.

Stations that apply – on the understanding they must not broadcast until they have been approved by the competent authorities – are scrutinised by CHARC, after which public consultations are held. If selected, they must wait to be assigned a frequency.

So far, calls for applications have been issued in five of the country’s 19 provinces, and the most headway has been made in Durazno, in the centre, Flores in the southwest and Lavalleja, in the southeast. In these provinces public hearings have already been held, and the stations are awaiting the assignment of frequencies.

“The plan is to finish the application process throughout the country this year. It’s a very gradual process,” said Prats. Only one frequency is made available in each geographic location, which “to a certain extent limits the aspirations of applicants,” but the political goal is “to regulate use of the spectrum.”

In 2013, “when the spectrum has been regulated, further calls for applications will be issued,” he said.

In March, public hearings will be held in the eastern provinces of Treinta y Tres and Cerro Largo.

José Imaz, of the Coalition for Democratic Communication and a member of the La Cotorra FM radio station in the Cerro neighbourhood of Montevideo, told IPS that “the law has set some very important precedents in terms of the democratisation of speech, which have been taken up in various decrees.”

But implementation of the application procedure “is excessively slow, and a major hurdle for future calls.”

Prats acknowledged there were administrative difficulties. “CHARC is an honorary body,” and therefore suffers from a “lack of resources,” he said.

Mega FM, a radio station in Vergara, a town of 4,000 people in the province of Treinta y Tres, had been broadcasting since 2008, one of the station’s members, Cristián Rodríguez, told IPS.

Two other community radio stations were also operating in Vergara. They all applied for frequency assignment and are awaiting a public hearing in March. “All three stations have shut down, they are all off the air,” Rodríguez said.

But “local people miss them, because Vergara is a small town and is accustomed to relying on the community radio stations,” he complained.

While it is unable to broadcast, Mega FM is posting on its web site videos of music concerts, sports events and other local activities on YouTube.

It is noteworthy that the Uruguayan law does not stipulate power limits for the frequencies, Kaplún said. “The limits will be set according to need and advisability.”

However, putting this guideline into practice raises difficulties. “The frequencies assigned in the first round are short range. Use of a 30-metre antenna and a power of 30 watts were established as general principles.”

In rural areas, where more wave bands are available and higher power is needed, “this general rule for frequency concession does not seem reasonable,” Kaplún said.

In contrast, in the capital city it is not easy to assign new frequencies on a spectrum that is overcrowded with private and public radio stations. “The spectrum should be redistributed, but this option was not chosen; instead, gaps in the spectrum are being used so as not to displace commercial and public broadcasters. This is untenable,” said Kaplún.

In Imaz’s view, the state should promote community radio stations and provide “economic aid for their installation, as well as distributing official advertising more widely to include community stations as well as commercial broadcasters.”

Prats said that in order to achieve “better implementation of the law, more economic and administrative resources should be allocated to CHARC.”

In future, he said, community radio stations “face a challenge: to be committed to playing a role in and for the community, without broadcasting political or religious propaganda.”

* This article was produced with the support of UNESCO.

Excerpt:

Uruguay took a giant step towards more democratic media when it passed a law on community radio broadcasting in 2007. But although regulations for the law were approved in late 2010, many broadcasters are now off the air and waiting to be assigned a frequency.

Community radio operator at La Cotorra. Credit: Courtesy of La Cotorra FM

Law 18.232 on Community Radio Broadcasting Service, promoted by civil society organisations, “is innovative and is regarded as one of the best of its kind,” Gabriel Kaplún, head of the degree course in communication sciences at the state University of the Republic, told IPS.

“It establishes a community radio broadcasting sector which is assigned one-third of the radio spectrum in every frequency band,” he said. A draft decree on digital television being prepared by the government also “reserves one-third for community broadcasters.”

Martín Prats, head of the Honorary Advisory Council for Community Radio Broadcasting (CHARC) as the representative of the Ministry of Industry, told IPS the law “establishes a transparent process for assigning frequencies in different parts of the country, which is the stage we are at. It is a process that has just begun; the results will be more visible next year.”

Based on the law, a census was carried out in 2008 to assign frequencies to community radio stations that were already on the air. A total of 413 projects applied, but only 92 of them met the legal requirements.

This process ended in 2010, and it was only in 2011 that calls were opened for applications in different parts of the country to assign frequencies to radio stations that had not necessarily been on the air before.

Stations that apply – on the understanding they must not broadcast until they have been approved by the competent authorities – are scrutinised by CHARC, after which public consultations are held. If selected, they must wait to be assigned a frequency.

So far, calls for applications have been issued in five of the country’s 19 provinces, and the most headway has been made in Durazno, in the centre, Flores in the southwest and Lavalleja, in the southeast. In these provinces public hearings have already been held, and the stations are awaiting the assignment of frequencies.

“The plan is to finish the application process throughout the country this year. It’s a very gradual process,” said Prats. Only one frequency is made available in each geographic location, which “to a certain extent limits the aspirations of applicants,” but the political goal is “to regulate use of the spectrum.”

In 2013, “when the spectrum has been regulated, further calls for applications will be issued,” he said.

In March, public hearings will be held in the eastern provinces of Treinta y Tres and Cerro Largo.

José Imaz, of the Coalition for Democratic Communication and a member of the La Cotorra FM radio station in the Cerro neighbourhood of Montevideo, told IPS that “the law has set some very important precedents in terms of the democratisation of speech, which have been taken up in various decrees.”

But implementation of the application procedure “is excessively slow, and a major hurdle for future calls.”

Prats acknowledged there were administrative difficulties. “CHARC is an honorary body,” and therefore suffers from a “lack of resources,” he said.

Mega FM, a radio station in Vergara, a town of 4,000 people in the province of Treinta y Tres, had been broadcasting since 2008, one of the station’s members, Cristián Rodríguez, told IPS.

Two other community radio stations were also operating in Vergara. They all applied for frequency assignment and are awaiting a public hearing in March. “All three stations have shut down, they are all off the air,” Rodríguez said.

But “local people miss them, because Vergara is a small town and is accustomed to relying on the community radio stations,” he complained.

While it is unable to broadcast, Mega FM is posting on its web site videos of music concerts, sports events and other local activities on YouTube.

It is noteworthy that the Uruguayan law does not stipulate power limits for the frequencies, Kaplún said. “The limits will be set according to need and advisability.”

However, putting this guideline into practice raises difficulties. “The frequencies assigned in the first round are short range. Use of a 30-metre antenna and a power of 30 watts were established as general principles.”

In rural areas, where more wave bands are available and higher power is needed, “this general rule for frequency concession does not seem reasonable,” Kaplún said.

In contrast, in the capital city it is not easy to assign new frequencies on a spectrum that is overcrowded with private and public radio stations. “The spectrum should be redistributed, but this option was not chosen; instead, gaps in the spectrum are being used so as not to displace commercial and public broadcasters. This is untenable,” said Kaplún.

In Imaz’s view, the state should promote community radio stations and provide “economic aid for their installation, as well as distributing official advertising more widely to include community stations as well as commercial broadcasters.”

Prats said that in order to achieve “better implementation of the law, more economic and administrative resources should be allocated to CHARC.”

In future, he said, community radio stations “face a challenge: to be committed to playing a role in and for the community, without broadcasting political or religious propaganda.”

* This article was produced with the support of UNESCO. (END)

The Onda Rural communication for development initiative in Peru has come up with a range of strategies to get information out to remote villages, to help them with decision-making on questions like climate change adaptation or disaster preparedness.

Radio Pachamama is a community station in the highlands region of Puno. Credit:Radio Pachamama

“Neither radio nor television will change the way of thinking or the traditional way of life in highlands communities,” Carlos Rivadeneyra, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters’ (AMARC) representative in Peru, told IPS.

But, he added, “they can help these communities have more information, to improve their practices and handle difficult situations better.”

Since 2004, AMARC, the Latin American Association for Radio Education (ALER) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have been carrying out activities in several countries of Latin America that include communication for rural development and policy-making – in particular the Onda Rural communication for development project.

In Peru, the work has been carried out mainly through radio programmes in three southern highlands regions, Puno, Cuzco and Arequipa, usually as part of FAO projects involving agricultural activities in emergency situations, like floods, freezing weather, or drought.

“Our contribution is aimed at connecting issues that are important for these communities with different radio networks in the country,” Rivadeneyra said.

The programmes are broadcast in Spanish, as well as Quechua and Aymara, the two indigenous languages spoken in Peru’s highlands communities, located 3,400 metres above sea level and higher.

The activities are focused on the production of short radio programmes in which local peasant farmers talk about weather events and experts explain why they occur and what can be done to prepare for and deal with each specific emergency situation.

Workshops for journalists and radio producers are also held, to promote the inclusion of these issues in radio programming.

“Normally information and news arrive after emergencies occur,” Rubén Mori, coordinator of the FAO Emergency Rehabilitation and Coordination Unit in Peru, told IPS. “The workshops are a good way to get reporters interested in these issues, so they can inform the communities about preparedness and risk management.”

AMARC and ALER have also organised workshops on climate change and environmental protection in the same regions, where they have formed a network of allies.

Claudio Orós, producer of the Sisichakunaq Pukllaynin radio programme – the name means “game of the ants” in Quechua – that is broadcast by 12 stations in Cuzco, told IPS that one of the most important aspects of the workshops is the sharing of experiences with colleagues from other towns and regions, which helps to make it possible to respond better to the needs of rural communities.

The programme addresses the question of protecting the environment by keeping traditional knowledge and customs alive. And the target audience is primary school children.

Produced by Orós’s Pukllasunchis Association, the 15-minute programmes are used as a teaching tool for teachers in rural schools in the district of Lares, in Cuzco region.

Like a story-teller, the narrator describes different situations faced by local communities, speaking in both Quechua and Spanish.

“The people of Quishuarani believe the ancient Inca still live on in the oldest ‘quiwuña’ (Polylepis) trees in the community. These trees are taller and thicker and are respected by everyone,” the radio announcer says, describing the beliefs of the community and their respect for nature.

Quishuarani is a village in Lares that basically depends on agriculture and is located along an Inca trail in an area with a large variety of wild trees. Local native traditions are very much alive in the community.

The local radio station coverage of these issues promoted by Onda Rural has used different approaches and styles.

In the city of Puno, Juan Sotomayor, the administrator of the Pachamama (mother earth) 850 AM radio station, said the training workshops have enabled the station’s team of journalists to become familiar with new technological tools and formats, and especially to adapt local questions to social and political contexts of a national scope.

Sotomayor said the radio station, which also broadcasts online, reaches the entire region, and 80 percent of its programming has an educational focus and is tailored for rural audiences.

Although the impact of these communication strategies has not been assessed, the organisations behind Onda Rural and the journalists involved say the local population is increasingly interested in the programmes, and is keen on participating.

But the effort has also run into obstacles.

Rivadeneyra said several activities have come to an end because the projects “are limited and have a modest budget.

“The state should support this kind of initiative, but it regrettably has weak participation in communication for development, and even more so in the areas of agriculture and the environment,” he said.

For that very reason, the project for an early warning system for weather events developed in highlands towns in Arequipa, Cuzco and Puno came to an end in spite of its impact and innovativeness.

Communication played a key role in that initiative: local residents trained to read the data from the weather stations set up in their villages relayed the information to the government’s national meteorology and hydrology service.

The national meteorology and hydrology service in turn processed the data and placed it on a special web page available to radio stations, which used it to produce early warning messages.

Unfortunately, the project ended in April 2009, Rivadeneyra said.

Mori explained that FAO funds have an end date, because they are principally related to emergencies. But he also said that since 2010, the United Nations agency has been working to link these initiatives with development projects that the local authorities can take control of.

While these challenges are tackled, the organisations have new projects up their sleeves.

FAO is working on a national agricultural risk management and climate change adaptation plan that will have to be disseminated among the communities, while AMARC is involved in the production of radio programmes to help indigenous people in the Amazon region of Ucayali deal better with floods.

* This article was published with support from UNESCO. (END)

Cleaning up a stream that used to be a garbage dump and restocking it with fish, or helping demobilised far-right paramilitaries reintegrate into society by returning to school, are some of the early outcomes of a project involving community radio stations in a remote area of northwest Colombia.

The project is called “Con-vivencias al dial: Radios para el encuentro” (roughly, “tuning in to shared experiences: radio stations bringing people together).

These social and environmental success stories stand in stark contrast to the long history of violence in the municipality of Tierra Alta, in the province of Córdoba, which has claimed countless victims, including Sergio Restrepo, a Jesuit priest killed by paramilitaries in 1989, after whom the community radio station that is a part of the project is named.

The agreement for the demobilisation of paramilitary groups, negotiated by the government of rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) and paramilitary commanders, brought about an improvement of the general situation.

But “there is still tension in the local area, and it will take 10 or 12 years to eradicate it, by developing educational and employment programmes, especially for young people,” Víctor Pantoja, a member of the programming committee for the Sergio Restrepo radio station, 105.0 FM in Tierra Alta, told IPS over the telephone.

“It’s also true that the messages of ‘Con-vivencias al dial’ are beginning to have an impact,” he said enthusiastically.

Of course, the initiative will not reach all 56,000 paramilitaries demobilised over the past decade, nor all of the victims of the armed conflict in this war-torn country.

But it is teaching radio production and broadcasting skills while producing 120 10-minute programmes that will be distributed to the radio stations participating in the project.

The plan was instigated by the Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MINTIC) and the Colombian Agency for Reintegration (ACR) – the government agency in charge of demobilisation and reinsertion strategies – with support from the Japanese fiduciary fund managed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

“The Japanese fund contributed 113,000 dollars, the ACR 150,000 dollars and the ministry 130,000 dollars,” María Fernanda Ardila, the deputy director of methodologies, monitoring and evaluation at MINTIC, told IPS.

“The main goal is to provide tools for community radio stations to support social reinsertion processes and play the role of mediators in bringing about peaceful coexistence,” Esmeralda Ortiz, a journalist who has worked in community radio since 1990, told IPS.

Ortiz, who works in the Ministry of Culture, has been coordinating the project, which is to last one year, since August 2011.

“The Ministry of Culture’s mission is to create contents that are consistent with the social reality of the specific cultural contexts in the different regions, and programming that strengthens nationality, identity, social participation and democracy,” said Ortiz.

To develop the plan, 20 municipalities were selected out of 1,067 studied, with a particularly violent history resulting from the forced displacement of persons and later mass demobilisation, in the context of the decades-long war in Colombia between leftwing guerrillas and government forces and their paramilitary allies.

The municipalities are located in the provinces of Atlántico, Bolívar, César and Magdalena, in the northern Caribbean region; Antioquía, Córdoba, Sucre and Santander, in the centre and northwest; and Casanare, Huila, Meta, Cundinamarca and Tolima, in the east, centre and west of the country.

Participants in these 20 municipalities are developing their skills and capabilities, in order to produce the radio programmes on their own in the future.

In the municipalities of Soledad and Planadas, in Atlántico and Tolima provinces, respectively, the main goal is to discourage young people from joining illegal armed groups.

The community radio station participating in the project in Soledad is Madrigal 88.1 FM Stereo, and in Planadas it is Musicalia Stereo 106.0 FM.

“The radio programme has been very, very, very useful. The skills training courses are very interesting,” Efrén Silva, an observer for the NGO Cruzada Social (Social Crusade) in Planadas, told IPS over the phone.

“This project is like a light for us, because we have been living in the midst of war here since 1940, and we have been perpetually afraid of saying anything,” Silva said.

Planadas is in the south of the western province of Tolima, near the Cañón de Las Hermosas, a remote river canyon taken over by the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). It was in this area that the Colombian army killed the top FARC commander, known as “Alfonso Cano”, in a military operation in November 2011.

“I would say that 60 percent of the population of about 40,000 people has come together because of the project. Women, children, teachers are all participating, and many musicians come here once a week to make music and entertain people,” said Silva.

“People are so keen on the project that one member of a community action group walks for two hours to get to Planadas, because, he says, he is convinced of the importance of the work that can be done through the radio station,” said Ortiz, the coordinator.

“I am surprised by the mass participation of young people in most of the municipalities. But the thing is that local people want not only music, but also to know what is happening in the country, and to find out about ways of solving their problems without violence and with respect for different ways of thinking and doing things, and there is a great deal to be done in that area,” she said.

Once the radio programmes are made, in addition to distributing them to the community stations, “we will take them to be broadcast by the national police radio station, university stations, and as many other stations as possible,” said Ortiz.

“We have so many stories to tell about people who used to be armed combatants, but who are now working for the community,” she said.

“For example, in Montes de María (a mountain range in the northern provinces of Sucre and Bolívar) former combatants are clearing minefields, and demobilised women are now running soup kitchens for the elderly,” she added.

* This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

Nisreen Awwad moves closer to the microphone as she signs off to her listeners, the words “Nisaa FM: music, change, success” displayed prominently over her left shoulder.

Nisaa FM radio’s morning show host Nisreen Awwad. Credit:Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS

“The thing I love (most) in my programme is when I interview simple women from the villages, because they are successful and (are doing) something different in their society,” the 31-year-old radio producer, a native of the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, tells IPS.

Host of the daily morning show on Nisaa (Women in Arabic) FM, Awwad explains that positively influencing the roles women play in Palestinian society, and changing the way Palestinian women view themselves, is what she strives for.

“I got involved here because I believe in the message of the radio station, and I wanted to make (a difference for) women in our society. Nisaa FM, I think, it’s something different,” Awwad said. “I like how my work in Nisaa FM makes me involved more in women’s issues.”

Launched in June 2010, Nisaa FM is an almost entirely female-run Palestinian radio station based in Ramallah, West Bank and the only radio station in the Middle East devoted solely to women’s issues. Its director Maysoun Odeh Gangat says that the station aims to inform, inspire and empower local women.

“Through the positive role that the women are playing in the society that we portray, we believe that we can empower women economically and then socially and politically. It could be any woman from the rural areas or the refugee camp, or a woman parliamentarian or minister,” Gangat told IPS.

In addition to suffering from a myriad of human rights abuses stemming from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, Palestinian women face challenges from within their own society.

According to a 2009 report released by the Palestinian Women’s Information and Media Centre (PWIC) in Gaza, 77 percent of the women in Gaza had experienced some form of violence; 53 percent had been exposed to physical violence and 15 percent to sexual abuse.

In 2008, the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development (AWRD) research centre found that 74 percent of survey respondents did not know of any organisation working on women’s rights. Some 77 percent of respondents also said that they supported enacting laws to protect women from domestic violence.

“This is a patriarchal society. This is a male-dominated society, so the change should come by addressing males, as well,” Gangat said, explaining that engaging Palestinian men on women’s issues is important to the station.

She added that talking about difficult issues – such as polygamy, divorce, abuse, early marriage, and poverty – and the ways in which women can assert their rights in these areas, is necessary for change to occur.

“Women were inspired by the fact that we bring some people or experts on issues that are contentious and negative. We’ve had some women calling and asking us, ‘Which organisation did you interview?’” Gangat said.

With hundreds of permanent and flying Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank, and with the Gaza Strip almost entirely sealed off, Palestinians are forced to deal with restrictions on their freedom of movement every day.

This difficult reality, combined with social and economic limitations within Palestinian society itself, makes radio stations like Nisaa that much more important, Gangat said.

“Radio can be accessible to all women in remote areas and it’s a very cheap and simple medium. I believe when women talk about their experiences in the Gaza Strip, they can pass it on to the women sitting in the West Bank, and vice versa,” she explained.

“Nisaa FM connects them together. Through the airwaves, we connect them together and they have a voice, a platform, which they can share and they can talk about their experiences.”

Today, the station’s impact is starting to be felt on the ground.

“(We) have been receiving hundreds of calls from workers who ask for clarifications about their rights after hearing the discussion on the radio,” wrote U’nwan Al-A’amel (“The Worker’s Address”), a Jenin-based organisation that protects Palestinian workers’ rights, in a press release.

“This only shows the great efficiency of media, and the speed and ease it offers in delivering information to a targeted group,” said the press release published in the Al Quds newspaper earlier this month.

In recent months, U’nwan Al-A’amel representatives have been invited to discuss issues related to workers’ rights under Israeli laws during Nisaa FM’s morning show.

“The working women in the agricultural branch in the Jordan Valley have also started to organise in groups and create committees that care to defend their usurped rights,” the group’s statement continued.

Presently, Nisaa broadcasts online and can be heard on the radio in the northern West Bank, Ramallah and Bethlehem. Finding a frequency to reach Hebron, the rest of the southern West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is the station’s next priority.

In the meantime, however, morning show host Awwad said the main focus remains changing local perceptions, and breaking through gender-based stereotypes in Palestinian society.

“Every day I interview unique and successful women. (In) the feedback, we always hear something nice, something different. We always hear, ‘Oh my God. You talk about these women… where (did) you find them?’” Awwad told IPS.

“Most of the time (women) are strong, (and) they can make the change. That’s what I hope.”

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO

Irman Meilandi unhesitatingly attributes the return of birds, wildlife and the forests around his hilly village of Mandalamekar in West Java province to conservation advice streaming in over community radio.

“Thanks to Radio Ruyuk (meaning scrubland), the people of Mandalamekar have adopted a campaign to replant deforested areas and conserve forests around the village,” says Meilandi, referring to the yet to be licensed community radio station that specialises on environmental issues.

Broadcasting on FM 107.8 megahertz, Radio Ruyuk goes on air at 6 p.m. and signs off at 11 p.m. Its programmes discuss organic farming, herbal plants and medicines and village infrastructure, all in the local Sundanese dialect.

“Radio Ruyuk was designed to encourage local people to pay attention to the condition of the village’s forests and wildlife,” says Meilandi, co-founder of the Mitra Alam Munggaran (Nature’s First Partner) or MAM, a social movement concerned with shrinking water supply in Mandalamekar, a seven-hour drive from Jakarta.

Established in 2002 by a dozen local residents, the MAM movement started out by organising public discussions, distributing leaflets and putting up posters, urging people to protect the forests around the village.

While MAM was able to get local officials to ban the harvesting of rattan, hunting, and cutting down trees in protected forests, cooperation from local people was initially missing. Many were involved in tree felling and cultivation on lands designated as water-catchment areas.

Radio Ruyuk has been organising, on Sunday evenings, a live talk show from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on various environmental issues confronting the 718-hectare village. The hosts and participants are mostly farmers and small traders, working voluntarily.

The issues discussed include tree-planting activities, with MAM activists occasionally joining in to explain local policies or provide updates on the status of Indonesia’s forests.

Indonesia, one of the world’s most densely forested countries along with Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congro, saw extensive deforestation through the last century. Its estimated forest cover of 170 million hectares in 1900 was halved by the beginning of this century.

“The MAM programme aims to raise local people’s awareness and stimulate a sense of responsibility toward the environment,” says village chief Yana Noviadi. “We wanted more people to be aware of the dangers of deforestation and to participate in replanting.”

Radio Ruyuk, which hit the airwaves for the first time in October 2008, is run by the Mandalamekar Community Broadcasting Council, which manages the radio station with Meilandi serving as its secretary.

“In the beginning, Radio Ruyuk focused on environmental issues, the link between the shrinking of river waters and deforestation in the area and also local forest-related policies,” says Noviadi.

In 2008, a year after he was elected village chief, Noviadi declared forest conservation as one of his official programmes, further boosting people’s participation in tree-planting activities.

By 2011, Mandalamekar had replanted a total of 118 hectares of deforested area, including some 40 hectares located around water sources, and before long the volume of water flowing into the village’s rivers had increased.

“Paddy fields that once lay fallow are now irrigated and farmers grow paddy all year round,” says Meilandi, adding that Mandalamekar has 34 hectares of irrigated paddy fields.

“More importantly, stories of local residents picketing water irrigation structures or quarrelling over water resources are unheard off now,” Meilandi says.

Noviadi concurs with Meilandi, saying that he had heard stories of farmers setting up traps to discourage people trying to divert water. “While these are now told in a joking manner, they were disturbing,” Noviadi says.

Since 2008, local officials have made it a policy to ask every visitor to the village to plant trees in designated areas. “We want their support for our programme. The idea is to instill environment awareness among visitors so they can do the same in their villages,” Noviadi says.

By law, community radio is limited to a radius of two-and-a-half km, but Radio Ruyuk is received in six districts with a combined population of more than 10,000 people.

“A neighbouring district head once phoned in with a request for a talk on steps that can be taken at the grassroots level to conserve forests. When we asked where he was calling from, he replied that he was at a gathering of village heads in his district who were waiting to hear us over the radio,” Noviadi said.

Mandalamekar’s conservation efforts have not gone unnoticed. For two consecutive years, in 2009 and 2010, it won the prize for the best self-financed village forest management programme at the regional level. It was also runner-up at the provincial level in 2010.

“To the best of our knowledge, the regional government never made any assessment of our forest management, but I guess they listen to Radio Ruyuk,” Meilandi says.

Meilandi himself claimed the 2011 Seacology Prize for his efforts to preserve the environment and culture of Mandalamekar. “They told me that I was chosen from among candidates in 46 countries,” Meilandi says.

Seacology, a non-profit with headquarters in Berkeley, California, focuses on preserving island ecosystems and cultures around the world.

“Winning awards has never been our goal,” Meilandi said. “We take pride in the fact that we were able to replant deforested areas with our own resources, without external help,” he says.

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO

(END)

MCRS, a government-approved community station, is one of a handful of localised radio stations providing China’s minorities with news and entertainment in their native languages. Presently, local state-run stations serve five out of 46 ethnic minorities and all programming is approved by the state.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20120320_communityradio_tibet.mp3[/podcast]

Community radio stations in Chile continue to call for a legal framework that would allow them to operate without restrictions, because although a specific law was passed nearly two years ago, it has not yet entered into effect.

Web site of the Amanecer radio station in Caldera, Chile. Credit: Courtesy Radio Amanecer

Community radio stations began to mushroom in Chile in 1990, when the 17-year-old dictatorship came to an end, although there were stations operating since the 1970s.

“We started out with the idea of an alternative media approach, outside the official line, talking about the things that were really happening to people in poor areas,” the president of the National Association of Community and Citizen Radio Stations of Chile (ANARCICH), Alberto Cancino, told IPS.

Today 420 community radio stations are operating in this South American country of 17 million people, and 300 of them belong to ANARCICH.

Others receive support from the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) or organisations like the Red de Medios de los Pueblos (Network of People’s Media), which also includes TV stations and alternative newspapers.

One of the most emblematic stations is Radio Amanecer of Caldera, a port 800 km north of Santiago in the arid region of Atacama. Founded in 1993 by the city’s association of neighbourhood councils, the station covers labour, social, cultural, environmental and religious issues and broadcasts at FM 93.7 and on the internet.

The first major crackdown on community radio stations occurred in mid-1991, driven by the powerful Association of Radio Broadcasters of Chile (ARCHI), which represents the large private stations.

“Their aim was to close us down because we weren’t legal, even though there was no law against us…There was persecution and some stations were shut down. They called us ‘media terrorists’,” Cancino said.

The first regulatory framework, passed in 1994, defined community radio stations as “limited range stations” and penalised stations that broadcast without a permit.

According to the community stations, the 1994 law had flaws and shortcomings involving both financing as well as coverage, because it limited the stations to one watt of broadcasting power.

A new law, on Free to Air Community and Citizen Radio Broadcasting Services, was passed in May 2010. But it has not gone into effect.

The biggest hurdle is that all of the radio stations that have been given a permit must move from the category of “limited range” to community stations, and in order to do so they must show that they belong to a non-profit organisation. Municipal and university stations are thus excluded.

The deadline to complete the process was originally Feb. 14, but ANARCICH secured an extension until November. The Undersecretariat of Telecommunications will then decide which radio stations will be given a permit – a process that could take six to 10 months.

The new law expands the limit on broadcasting power from one to 25 watts, the height of the station’s antennas from six to 10 metres, and the length of the concessions from three to 10 years.

But it assigns only five percent of the available FM broadcast frequencies to community stations – the last portion on the dial, between 105.9 and 107.9. It also keeps in place a ban on advertising that means the stations can only finance themselves by means of ads for businesses located within the station’s range.

While some see the law as a step forward, others say it does not represent a significant improvement.

“Community radio stations are now recognised, but with many restrictions that have to do with the assignment of broadcasting spectrum, the power with which they can operate, and problems of supporting themselves, of financing, and of location on the dial,” Perla Wilson, the vice president of the AMARC Latin America chapter’s Women’s Network, told IPS.

Cancino, on the other hand, says the law is “our great pride today…it may be limited, some people say it is bad, but it is a law that was passed specifically for community radio stations, and that didn’t exist before.”

Wilson said Chile is one of the few Latin American countries with legislation that makes broadcasting without a licence by community radio stations a crime punishable by prison, which is an attack on freedom of expression, according to United Nations and Organisation of American States special rapporteurs.

The origin of the problem, in Wilson’s view, lies in the concept that the broadcasting spectrum, sound waves and frequencies can be privately owned, when they are really “a public asset and should be distributed on the basis of social development criteria.”

Chile should follow in the footsteps of other Latin American countries, like Argentina, which reserves one-third of the broadcasting spectrum for community radio stations, Wilson said.

Laws on community radio stations passed in Uruguay and Colombia, recognition of community stations in the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador, and citizen participation in the drafting of the law in Argentina all serve as examples of how Chile’s legislation could be improved, she added.

Under these laws, the state’s authority is limited to administering the radio spectrum, based on the view that access to radio frequencies should not be subject to major restrictions.

“We are pushing for a broad debate on the production of audiovisual services,” Wilson said. “Chile’s communications laws are piecemeal and fragmented. This law, as it stands, is not applicable.”

But in Cancino’s view, the previous law was “so bad, and at least now there is a new law of a kind that never existed before.”

Both Cancino and Wilson stress the importance of community radio.

In the district of Peñalolén on the east side of Santiago, the Encuentro 107.3 FM radio station is operated by an association of the same name, dedicated to narrowing the digital divide and promoting digital literacy by bringing information technology and telecommunications to different neighbourhoods.

The station, founded in 1998, has links to other non-profit projects, such as a network of community telecentres, computer courses, and primary and secondary school classes for adults.

The community radio movement demonstrated its influence in the 2011 student demonstrations held to demand reforms of the educational system – the largest wave of protests since the return to democracy in 1990.

“In 2011, we had enormous production of independent programming aired in a cooperative manner,” said Wilson.

“We kept open channels, principally in support of the student movement…the community radio stations will always be present to let people know what is happening,” Cancino said.

In November 2011, when the protests had been raging for six months and Congress was just a few hours away from approving the budget for 2012, the students and community and citizen radio stations provided 30 hours of continual programming.

The aim was to support and bring visibility to the social actors committed to the educational reform movement, and at the same time strengthen community radio stations.

In Wilson’s view, “the communication barrier was broken down by the charisma of the student leaders who drew the attention of the large media outlets. But community stations, local stations and social networks also helped break it down.”

“All of that came together in a way of communicating by the social movement that is obviously based on our history (as community stations),” she said.

* This article was produced with the support of UNESCO.

Scene in north Bougainville Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
PORT MORESBY, Feb 13 2012 (IPS)

It was the decade-long civil war in the autonomous Bougainville region that inspired the founding of New Dawn FM, a community radio station recognised for contributing to the rebirth of civil society and development.

In 2001, a peace agreement ended a devastating conflict triggered by the destructive legacy of the foreign-operated Panguna copper mine. All radio broadcasting infrastructure on the island was destroyed during the war, which claimed 20,000 lives.

After Bougainville was granted autonomy in 2005, former broadcasting journalists overcame logistical hurdles to launch PNG’s first community radio station.

“Our biggest challenge starting New Dawn FM was actually finance, as we were just coming out of the crisis and we had no money,” recounted Aloysius Laukai, manager of the station. “But we received some assistance through UNESCO and the German government and we started the radio.”

The international funding paid for studio equipment and a transmitter.

According to the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, AMARC, ‘community radio is not about doing something for the community, but about the community doing something for itself.’ For many provincial communities separated by mountains and dense rainforest in Papua New Guinea (PNG), self-sufficiency is a necessity.

This is reflected in PNG’s strong community radio sector which dominates commercial radio services across the country. The National Information and Communications Technology Authority confirms that nationwide there are 62 licensed commercial radio stations and 133 community radio stations.

Today Bougainville has a population of approximately 300,000. New Dawn broadcasts in English and ‘Tok Pisin’, the lingua franca, to nearly 50,000 listeners across northern Bougainville and has plans to expand coverage to the central town of Arawa.

PNG’s National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) operates in the autonomous region as well.

“New Dawn broadcasts during the day 18 hours, while NBC broadcasts just about 12 hours per day,” Laukai said, explaining the differences.

New Dawn also has a news blog accessible where there is mobile network coverage in Central and South Bougainville. This is a significant communication service to rural areas lacking basic public services.

The station prioritises community empowerment, local current affairs and supports reconciliation. It uses live broadcasts of reconciliation ceremonies and landmark events taking place in different parts of the province to build inter-community trust where once there was bitter division.

“We cover a lot of activities the government is doing for peace and reconciliation,” Laukai explained. “If there is a happening, like an inauguration in Arawa, we broadcast from there to our listeners on Buka Island. Because our aim is to make sure they are in tune; North Bougainville is in tune with what is happening in South Bougainville.”

Another challenge is addressing the generation that missed out on education during the conflict and many ex-combatants who feel excluded from mainstream society.

‘We are working with World Vision (an evangelical relief and development umbrella organisation) now on an education project of adult learning programmes,” Laukai said. The station will begin broadcasting to adult learners throughout Central Bougainville this year.

Following ten years of peace, development is the next priority, especially for 97 percent of Bougainville’s population that lives in rural areas. New Dawn encourages farmers to seek and share knowledge via the airwaves.

“We have had problems with cocoa pod borer in the last year,” recounted Laukai, “Many (farmers) cut off their trees and planted new ones. But one farmer did his own experiment in removing shade trees, chasing the insects away with sunlight.” The story helped recover production.

In other areas of social development, the community broadcaster has been drawing on the power of international collaboration.

In 2010, it initiated a programme design workshop with the Commonwealth of Learning – an intergovernmental organisation tasked with increasing access to education in developing Commonwealth countries – Bougainville’s ministry of community affairs and non-government organisations (NGOs).

An important outcome of the workshop was ‘Bougainville Women Today’, a community-based learning programme addressing women’s health issues such as teenage pregnancies as well as malaria.

To actively involve the community, “we have established listeners’ clubs, like women’s groups,” Laukai elaborated. “They come and we design the programmes. Every time we broadcast a programme, we put it on a CD and we send it out to these listeners’ clubs. Then they listen to them at their own location and at their own timing.”

The pioneering broadcaster has faced challenges, although lack of media freedom is not one.

“Since we started, we haven’t encountered any problems, even from the government or from the members,” Laukai stated. “We feel like we are free to do what we are doing, but we must be responsible reporters.”

The media in PNG operate in a self-regulatory environment. The 1989 censorship act sets general standards of broadcasting, but media laws are enabling and follows national policy that states: “All people have the right to be dynamically involved in the processes of their own development and should have the opportunity to participate in communication processes at all levels.”

The main challenge was financial. “Since we started, we were really struggling to run the station,” Laukai admitted. “In 2008, we got some funding after we covered the funeral service of the late president and the local government gave us Kina 50,000 (24,125 dollars). Last year, they gave us a grant of another 24,125 dollars. But we are building our own capacity.”

Some revenue is generated by broadcasting parliament sessions and giving members time on air for questions.

According to Helen, a listener who works with a local development NGO, “the government programme is very helpful. We learn what the President and his government are doing. Many people we work with want to know what the government is doing on the island, so we can tell them.”

Word of New Dawn’s achievements spread and, in 2009, it received the Communication and Social Change Award from the University of Queensland, Australia.

This year the station is set to make a significant contribution in the national election. At a recent meeting between the electoral commission and national media, the station put forward a proposal to use frontline short messaging service or SMS technology, which it has used in operations since 2011, as a tool in preventing election fraud.

“We really introduced a good network which the whole of PNG can use to monitor the election,” Laukai proudly claimed.

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

By Manipadma Jena
KONARK, India, Feb 9 2012 (IPS)

Fisher Wanka Masani, 25, has been inseparable from his two- dollar transistor ever since a community radio (CR) station started up in this coastal town. The square black box blares popular songs while Masani waits for his brothers to land the daily catch.

Radio Namaskar (the traditional Indian greeting), on the air since February 2010, offers much more than entertainment to the 2,000 active fishers from a 10,000-strong settlement of mud hut dwellers along Odisha state’s Chandrabhaga coastline on the Bay of Bengal.

Cyclonic storms often threaten the fragile vessels of the fishers, and their lives. Television weather forecasts are unreliable because power supply in these parts is erratic.

“Radio Namaskar broadcasts high wind and cyclone warnings at short intervals; its range extends 35 km out into the sea,” says Gengri Mania, 40, who carries a radio when he accompanies his brother-in-law on fishing trips.

Heavy rains and high floods often leave families stranded and huddling on rooftops, sometimes for days together, as happened in the Gop administrative block in September 2011.

“Radio Namaskar’s dedicated mobile phone line was a life-saver,” says Ali Akbar Shah, 37, whose house was among the first to be hit by a huge body of water when the Kushabhadra river embankment was breached.

Shah managed to grab a brace of seven mobile phone sets from his mobile repair shop with which he kept up staedy communication with the CR on all the three days that he and his neighbours were stranded on rooftops.

“The local mosque announced the breach at 9.30 in the night. We just had time to move the sleeping children and essentials to the asbestos roof when the rooms started filling with water,” remembers Shah.

Artarana Behera, who runs a bicycle repair shop in nearby Helari village, also hit by this flood, says his joint family of 13 members, including his aged parents and small children, had to seek refuge on his roof.

“We survived on two kg of beaten rice that we ate on the first day and kept up communication through Radio Namaskar’s community phone call number 9040904904 dedicated to SoS messages from flood victims.”

More than a thousand calls were recorded from flood-affected people on this dedicated phone number over that week.

Identifying from these calls spots where relief material was needed on priority, the administration rushed food packages, candles and tarpaulin sheets for shelter from the rain.

“Radio Namaskar broadcast flood updates every 10 minutes, 24X7, for the three days that the water level stayed high. The administration too used the CR to make announcements. I am happy I could be of service,” says Shah.

After Radio Namaskar’s crucial role as intermediary between stranded victims and relief and rescue operations on the other, many villagers saw the CR on FM 90.4 MHz frequency as a saviour and bought the two- dollar sets made by a firm in Kolkata city and already selling well there.

Subas Nayak, 34, Konark Municipality Councillor, representing the fishers’ community, says CR has transformed life on the coast and helped fishers from being cheated by middlemen.

“The five local cold-storage owners who are also big fish buyers would decide on prices of commercial varieties prior to fish landings everyday and control the auction prices,” Nayak said.

The fishers could do nothing because they had no infrastructure to hold their catch. But, once Radio Namaskar began announcing daily prices of fish varieties in the markets of Kolkata city, where Konark’s fish catches are sold, the game was up. The fishers now have a say in deciding fair prices.

The popularity of the CR can be gauged from its most popular programme ‘Janata Darbar’ (People’s Court) and ‘Sir, Tike Sunibe?’ (Sir, Can you Kindly Lend Your Ear?) on which communities air their problems and grievances through focused 30-minute discussions, seeking redress from government agencies or elected leaders.

“Ninety percent of our success stories are women-led,” says Naseem Ahmed Shah Ansari, 36, founder and chairperson of Radio Namaskar.

All the 72 listener groups are led by women, he says, adding: “We want women to be the change makers in our predominantly rural setting.”

The women’s groups ensure quality food reaches the ‘anganwadis’, a government scheme that provides food supplements to children, pregnant and lactating mothers. They intervene to get dalit (low caste) girls admission into schools and widows get their pension.

Programmes are broadcast at listener-convenient timings for eight hours daily, covering youth, local self-governance, agriculture and citizen rights and recordings on compact disc handed over to the local administration for action.

Because of limited funds, the CR runs its programme entirely through 25 volunteers, ranging from Narayan Das, 62, a retired school teacher, to 18-year-old Sharup Saha, a student.

“Neither the federal government nor funding organisations have any specific policy in place yet for funding CRs in India,” laments Ansari.

The initial funds too were hard to come by: of the 22,000 dollars invested half came from Radio Namaskar’s parent organisation, Young India, while the rest was loaned interest-free by other non- government organisations.

“Revenue from government advertisements is eyewash. We get a pittance and payments are invariably delayed,” says Ansari who is now looking at private advertisements, allowed for 5 minutes per hour of broadcast, as additional revenue.

For now, garnering listenership by being relevant to the community is Radio Namaskar’s main focus, he said.

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

By IPS Correspondents
Feb 9 2012 (IPS)

Manipadma Jena speaks to listeners and staff of Radio Namaskar on the role of this community radio station in India’s Bay of Bengal.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20120316_namaskar_manipadma.mp3[/podcast]

Radio advocates believe there are barriers for community radio stations in Ghana, which are detrimental to press freedom. Credit: Sandra Ferrari

By IPS Correspondents
Feb 1 2012 (IPS)

Sandra Ferrari reports on the battle to find frequencies for community radio in Ghana to enable marginalized to take part in development

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20120320_communityradio_ferarri.mp3[/podcast]