Going Green with Community Radio
Community radio is a low cost method that can be employed to reach many poor and marginalized parts of Africa and the developing world with a message of how to protect the environment.
Radio, as a means of communication, is very personal, and can deliver messages right to the hearts of listeners.
Community radio can be very empowering to communities because it can inspire people to look at their needs, discuss their problems and look for solutions in a conversational manner.
Because of its conversational quality, community radio can make people become intimately involved with their own individual reality. Oral communication is deeply rooted in many African societies, and community radio can easily tap into this aspect of lived reality, and influence it to propagate environmentally friendly solutions.
Moreover, community radio can reach millions of people with a single broadcast; thus it is a good and effective tool to mobilize an entire society towards a common vision. In other words, community radio conversation can touch upon general patterns of interaction within society.
Many poor rural people turn to their informal networks of family, kin, friends, and neighbours, the very networks that are touched by community radio. Therefore community radio can build a groundswell that can lead to action directed towards social change.
Precisely, community radio can influence participatory approaches that can get local people to act as partners in problem identification, data collection, analysis and follow-up action.
It is important to state, in order to be effective, community radio has to be in a position to purvey credible information that ca help people to make informed decisions.
Community radio can indeed play a role in the community to facilitate social change. Perhaps its greatest advantage is that it is not very expensive. However, in many parts of Africa, governments tend to put in place rules and regulations that severely limits the potential of community radio to communication.
In the absence of appropriate regulations which promote free and fair expression, communication through radio is stifled. Oftentimes, national governments in Africa use radio as propagandist tool aimed at manipulating the masses.
Many governments are afraid of criticism and therefore opt to muzzle any modes of communication that are seen as a potential threat to propagandist projects.
Issues to do with the environment often put national governments under the spotlight, which often leads to the criticism of existent policies and regulations. If allowed to grow, community radio can play a key role in highlighting the local impact of central government’s environmental policies and practices.
At the same time, community radio can reach out to millions of people with messages that can encourage better treatment of the environment or adoption of better practices.
Freedom of expression and of the media lie at the heart of successful environmental projects. In the absence of this important prerequisite, the fight against environmental degradation will forever remain a pipedream.
