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Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 01:57:37 -0000
From: "Chifu" <chifu2222@msn.com>
From: "Chifu" <chifu2222@msn.com>
Subject: New Fund for African Community Radio
New Fund for African Community Radio
Highway Africa News Agency
http://www.highwayafrica.org.za/hana/
Contact Information:
+27 46 636 1590
highwayafrica@ru.c.za
November 21, 2004
Posted to the web November 23, 2004
Guy Berger
Marrakech
Contact Information:
+27 46 636 1590
highwayafrica@ru.c.za
November 21, 2004
Posted to the web November 23, 2004
Guy Berger
Marrakech
African community radio may get a boost from the formation of an international task force to investigate setting up an international fund to underwrite resources for the sector, a meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco decided today (21 November, 2004).
The initiative parallels global initiatives to set up a "Digital Solidarity Fund" that flowed out of last year's United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
Community radio voices struggled for recognition at WSIS, and have now decided to go it alone to raise donor resources to support their activities, particularly for buying broadcast equipment.
The initiative to create a global fund will "need to find ways to articulate with the Digital Solidarity Fund which is focused on telecoms infrastructure", said Steve Buckley, president of world community radio network, AMARC which arranged the Morocco meeting.
AMARC operates in 110 countries, has 364 member stations in Africa and operates the Simbani news agency.
Buckley noted that opportunities existed for community radio to expand its scale in many countries. International development agencies were now ready to mainstream the funding of community radio. Ten years earlier, only Denmark and UNESCO had been interested in funding community radio. Now the G8 countries and other international groups were in on the act.
He said the fund would "focus on short term investments for long-term sustainability". It would be a catalyst for national policy changes to create the funding to dramatically increase the scale of community radio.
Social returns on community radio were enormous, said Nick Ishmael- Perkins, a London-based development consultant, who outlined how this grassroots form of media could advance the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. He explained that community radio: was a cost- effective way to reach particular audiences; had programme content and structure that promoted people's rights to participation in health, education and other areas of development and democracy; used local languages to increase people's understanding and access to information.
Ishmael-Perkins gave the example of a radio station in Cameroon which had been shown to raise community awareness about reforestation by two-thirds.
Speaking in support of a specialised fund, George Christensen, vice president of AMARC, and a radio journalist based in The Gambia, said community radio had won global recognition as an important sector of the media.
However, notes of caution were sounded by several speakers, warning that "selling" community radio as a delivery channel for development ideas could contradict the importance of the medium in giving voice to active community voices.
Jayaweera Wijayanandra, director of Unesco's Communications Development Division, spoke about the difficulties of getting donors to forego direct relations with projects and work instead through a global fund.
>From the World Bank, Krezentia Duer, said that her institution had tended to look at information for development in terms of linear information dissemination. This focused on examples like the media giving the public information about government spending.
She explained the difficulties of persuading her banking principals about seeing community radio in terms of giving communities voice, and about getting donors to accept that performance indicators were problematic in a genuinely participatory approach to development.
Another speaker, Beninese broadcaster, Souleye Issiaka emphasised the importance of going beyond support for broadcast infrastructure to encompass resources for training for community stations. He also underlined the need to build national associations of community radio stations that could lobby for support for public funds from their national governments.
A closing declaration called for both an Africa-wide fund as well as national level funds for supporting community radio.
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