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Creating Sustainable Community Radio Stations – a major challenge!
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UNESCO is one of several
development partners working to support the establishment of community
radio in Mozambique. UNESCO is presently working to capacitate eight
different communities in their wish to start a community radio since
1998. Besides from these 8 new stations, UNESCO is supporting four
stations already on air, the creation of a women’s community radio
network and a national co-ordination forum for community radio. UNESCO
got involved in this development as part of its implementation efforts
within a major media development project, aimed at “Strengthening
Democracy and Governance through Development of the Media in
Mozambique”.
Looking at Mozambique with literacy rates of 59% for
men and a low 29% for women (1997 census), knowing that only a quarter
of the population speaks the only common language, Portuguese, at a
level sufficient to follow and understand fully a radio broadcast news
bulletin in that language, taking into consideration the vastness of the
country and its many distinctly different languages and cultures – along
with the oral communication being both traditional, familiar and
effective, community radio is a very appropriate response to the
development issues at stake.
In preparation of turning plans into reality,
creating these powerful - yet fragile - institutions, we carried out a
number of studies to assess sustainability potentials and obstacles. The
studies provided us with details of what we expected and somehow already
knew: that when moving outside of the urban centres, experience with the
creation of organisational structures, let alone effectively managing
these, was very weak, when not totally absent. We would therefore need
to design a process, doing our utmost to establish effective mechanisms
to create a sound foundation for success, basing ourselves as much as
possible on local capacity and local organising experience available.
At the same time, when looking around at the
local/community radio stations already established, we saw ample
evidence of the challenges and obstacles identified: stations being off
the air for long periods of time due to lack of proper technical
configurations (like lack of provision to protect against the general
fluctuations and sudden surges in the electricity supply as well as lack
of earthing protection mechanism against the effects of the frequent and
powerful lightening ‘attacks’) and lack of effective financial and/or
technical backup systems in place. This, combined with inadequately
trained staff and usually a very fragile community-base for the radios,
rendered such local radio stations extremely vulnerable.
Four decisive factors were identified to minimise
this vulnerability and thus to ensure the sustainable functioning of the
stations we could assist in creating:
(1) A strong community ownership should
be at the core: when the community feels that this is their station to
which it provides producers and stories, where it assists in overcoming
financial problems, and where it prevents theft by all being alert and
protective, only then would a station in rural Mozambique have a chance
of survival. Creating this community ownership feeling takes time.
Therefore we decided to plan for a one to two year mobilisation and
capacitation phase before arrival of the magic equipment, which would
absorb all interest once in place.
(2) Furthermore effective training and
capacitation would need to be organised, facilitating that the
farmers, the school teachers, the accountants, school children – in
brief: the community, could run the station effectively in terms of
management and community relations, programming, administration and
technical maintenance.
(3) A technical sustainability system
was needed, including effective and realistic responses at the different
levels of support needed.
Beyond these core factors addressed in detail below,
the importance of (4) financial viability beyond the period during which
the UNESCO project is able to provide a security net for the station is
being addressed in our work with our partners, including limiting costs
to the absolute necessary minimum, on the one hand, and assisting to
devise a multi-facetted system of sources of income – and capacity
within the community to maintain this – on the other.
In many other parts of the world, community radio
stations grow out of vocal civic movements, requiring a radio station to
voice their concerns and ensure fulfilment of their objectives. As
described above, few such civic movements exist in Mozambique, yet the
need for communication media is great.
Based on the assessments above, and the initial
realisation that the inception method of the stations already on (or
again off) air needed important improvements, we decided to start with
pilot stations in three locations which the project had identified in
different parts of the country, all providing the minimum conditions of
some basic infrastructures in place (like electricity and accessibility
by air or road), yet in acute need of a communication medium. This was
later expanded to include altogether eight communities, six of which are
situated rather far outside the provincial capitals.
Based on experiences from many countries, and with
the aim of a broad-based community involvement in the initial
establishment of the radio stations, we designed a social mobilisation
process, carefully identifying in each community the many
sub-communities within, ensuring information to, dialogue with and
mobilisation of all of these.
The initial rounds of such mobilisation culminated in
a large community meeting that elected an installation committee under
procedures designed to ensure representativity, credibility and the
availability of sufficient capacity to drive the installation process.
The national and otherwise very open and democratic
media legislation does not yet recognise “community media” as such.
When neither state nor commercial, a community needs to form an
association which can be granted a license/sending permission and a
frequency. The first challenge for the installation committee was thus
to prepare a set of statutes through community meetings, that have to
achieve a certain level of consensus on what the objectives and
modalities of this new organism are to be.
Once the papers of the association, including
statutes, identification of the founding members, etc, have been
approved by the provincial governor (representing the state in each of
the ten national provinces), the general founding assembly elects its
social bodies, including the presidency of the association, the
management committee, and the supervisory inspection committee,
overseeing that the management committee conscientiously works along the
lines agreed in the general assembly.
Once the association is founded, the management
committee takes over the functions of the installation committee, and in
most cases we have seen an important similarity in the composition of
the two bodies: when community members have served well and continued to
be credible and worthy of the community’s respect and trust after
serving for the initial period on the installation committee, they are
also elected to continue the important organising and mobilisation work
in the communities.
When the association is functional, it can have a
radiation study carried out, upon which it can apply for a sending
permission, including a license and a frequency. Now the legal basis for
the community ownership is in place. In order, however, to ensure not
only the formal, but the real, felt and functional community ownership,
this is only the very beginning.
To maintain and to ensure a continued broad-based
community representation in the management committees, we have
recommended strongly that the community radio associations have 12-14
members like the installation committees. This also means that once the
organisation process is so far that it is time to recruit the four paid
staff members of the radio station, each of these can have a background
support group from the management committee of three to four of its
members.
These background groups are initially pivotal in
ensuring a good entry into the community work by the staff members, who
are recruited to ensure the effective implementation of the community’s
dreams and aspirations. As such they are the employees of the community,
and need to know this very clearly on the one hand. On the other it is
in many of the places, where community radios are being established,
very difficult to identify persons with knowledge and experience in the
area of management, administration, mobilisation and technical support.
Mentoring, training, support and thorough and continued coaching of the
staff members by the management committee background groups, is usually
needed.
This is a good beginning for ensuring the real-life
community ownership. We are, however, still talking only about a very
limited group of people from the community involved in the work, and
have still no programmers involved!
In order to accommodate this need, we created what we
called a “Process Coach Scheme”: a person is employed to work in the
community every or every second weekend. This coach is responsible for
the mobilisation process within the community, for assisting and
facilitating the organising work of first the installation committee and
afterwards the management committee, and finally for organising training
processes for the many volunteer community members in order to prepare
them to function effectively within and around the community radio. As
most volunteers are interested in becoming community radio programmers,
the coaches have to stress the importance of some support functions that
also need community assistance, such as security guarding, cleaning and
keeping the membership files in order, and not least the important
functions of a technician.
The Process Coach Scheme has proven to be extremely
adequate and effective, creating not only a basic nucleus of between 20
and 70 knowledgeable, trained, committed and highly motivated community
members around the station, but also having ensured that much wider
parts of the many communities within the community are informed about
the processes and plans, thus ensuring their feeling of belonging to the
process.
Besides from these two primary and parallel processes
– creation of the association and the process coach scheme - both
pivotal in creating community ownership feeling, a number of other, very
different measures have been carried out, in order to facilitate the
community ownership: Effective enrolment, registration and documentation
of memberships; a well thought out and strategic location of the future
station; encouragement that the radios create a comfortable, community
meeting area just outside of the station: a shady place selling tea and
sodas with wooden pillars and grass roof (“palhota”); just to mention a
few of the many possible, adequate local means and ideas to give the
radio a true community profile.
Starting a community radio or a newspaper can seem
relatively simple, with the funds available and one or a few dynamic
core persons involved. When we for the first time visited isolated
communities, expecting them to ask us to turn the funds earmarked for
starting a radio into improved schools or hospitals, we were met with
clear community statements demonstrating the need for a radio station,
explaining to us what the local problems are, and giving concrete
examples of how a radio could help the community overcome some of these.
We have been encouraged to find that even without much schooling and
very few opportunities for receiving information, let alone much
knowledge of what “a radio” is, people know well what their needs are,
and have clear ideas about how to get there. So even in these difficult
contexts, the initial dynamism to get something going can be found.
Ensuring a sustainable continuity, by contrast, is like in most other
contexts in the world, extremely difficult.
In order to create their own radio station,
communities have to start from scratch in practically all areas that
form crucial parts of the capacity to run a sustainable and effective
community radio station: community radio management, organisational
development, staff and volunteer management, administration and
financial management including donor relations and fundraising,
programming and programme format production including audience research
and continued audience relations, not to mention technical operation and
(preventive) management skills.
In all communities there are people who possess some
of these skills, at times due to training and education, yet in most
cases due to amply proven real life experience in making life work – too
often under extremely adverse conditions. The challenge is to identify
these people, ensure that they become involved in some way in the
organisation in or around the radio, and to create a number of adequate
ways to further strengthen this capacity and the many others that are
needed.
Based on our needs assessment, we have designed a
five-tier capacitation strategy including the following components: (i)
A series of intensive 8-10 day training courses, (ii) A community
training programme through process coaches, (iii) Exposure to related
realities, including study trips to other community, commercial and
public radio stations, (iv) Management Seminars and Workshops, and
finally (v) Establishment of a ‘Training Station’, which can receive
teams of up-starting radio stations and help these get going at a basic,
yet sound basis and pace.
2.1 Intensive Community Radio Training Courses
With the aim to facilitate the concrete and high
quality transfer of concrete skills, we organised a series of five
intensive 8-10 day training courses in the following areas:
-
“How to
start and manage a community radio station”;
-
“Community Radio Programming”;
-
“Audience
Research”;
-
“Preventive Maintenance, level I and II”.
Each course had to be organised several times in
different parts of the country, in order to allow 2 – 4 representatives
of each of our partner communities to participate in each of these
courses without exceeding a total of 16-18 participants per course in
order to ensure maximal training impact.
Upon return the participants organised – often in
collaboration with the coach - seminars for the relevant groups of
community volunteers, thus sharing the skills they had acquired and
discussing how to make best use of these locally.
For the five course areas we have developed
tailor-made training materials in Portuguese language, which
participants took back home and used as a basis for further community
capacitation. These materials include formats for budgeting, job
descriptions and contract formats for different paid and/or volunteer
staff contracts, basic formats for development of internal policy papers
including the rules and regulations for the many different areas of work
of the stations, overviews of different programme types as well as
methods for development of overall programming formats and plans,
audience research methodologies and background materials to be locally
adapted, technical manuals, guides on establishment of preventive
management routines, and much more.
The strength of these courses is the special,
intensive training and capacity-building dynamic of bringing people
together for a longer period – day and night – to learn, discuss and
live with new concepts, insights and skills. The effect of this type of
training covers all three of the well-known “KAP” set of factors,
providing Knowledge, working during the many days and through the
intense nature on the participants’ Attitudes, and imparting
some new skills through – initial - Practice. All of these
factors are crucial for our partners to obtain a broad-based insight
into the many factors that bring life to the community’s radio dreams.
On top of this, the courses and the way they were
organised yielded a number of important secondary effects: While all
communities are different and include individuals with different basic
capacities, bringing people together from different parts of the
country, who are all in the same basic situation resulted in strong
lateral links and a feeling of partnership between the eight
participating communities. We have seen important examples of these
being brought to effective mutual use. Another – to many individuals
overwhelmingly – important factor is, that these courses brought
participants around in their country. Many of the rural community radio
programmers we are working with, had previously never been very far
outside of their birthplace, and thus often visited the capital Maputo
and the other training locations for the very first time.
As the programming of the community radios is
primarily based on volunteer staff, a certain circulation/fluctuation in
this corps must be expected. Training can therefore not be done once and
for all, but rather has to be seen as a process that continuously trains
new entrants, and further develops the skills of those already involved.
UNESCO in Mozambique – concretely our media development project here –
is therefore planning to repeat all of the courses already held, and to
develop new types of intensive training courses and seminars, including
topical seminars capacitating the community programmers to cover
effectively core development issues such as HIV/AIDS, Health in general,
Agriculture, Environment, Gender, Youth – with an emphasis on the girl
child, etc.
However, downsides of these courses are not only
their comparatively high costs (travel, board, high level trainers,
course and material development and printing) and the necessity of a
full-time person in charge of the organisation. A more fundamental
weakness is that the courses can only provide training for two or at
best three or four representatives from each community. While often
these representatives conscientiously share what they have experienced
and learnt with the community upon return, this does not always happen,
at times for a lack of will, more often due to lack of capacity to do so
effectively.
Without underestimating the strength and importance
of our training courses, we therefore deemed these alone as being far
from sufficient to capacitate communities to be in charge of their own
radio station. We thus had to identify an effective way of training the
communities in a much broader way and came up with a concept, which
proved to live up very effectively to our expectations: The Process
Coach Scheme.
After getting the idea of having regular training
activities taking place in the community for all its members interested
in becoming involved in the work with the radio, the question was: how?
What kind of people, professionals, would be effective as community
facilitators, mobilisers and trainers? As these “coaches” would be
required to prepare the basis for strong and empowering community action
through the development of a community medium, we identified as the core
and overriding quality needed, a personal one: the coach would need to
be used to and to have a proven capacity to work effectively with rural
communities, in an atmosphere of respect and mutuality. The challenge to
the coach would be to empower people, who had no or very little
experience with seeing themselves as dynamic forces in their community’s
democratic development, who had strongly varying – and often only very
basic - educational and experience backgrounds. And to capacitate these
future community movers through basic awareness-raising, through
concrete individual and collective capacity building and through
creation of comprehensive organisational structures.
We therefore decided to look for either radio
journalists, local school teachers or community organisers/workers with
this profile, who were living as near as possible to the communities in
question. The first group of three coaches were all recruited from the
public broadcasting station, two of these, however, being women who
formed part of a special national programme with a focus on rural women.
These three journalists – with different levels of professional
background, education and experience themselves – knew about radio, but
little or nothing about what community radio could be. We
therefore needed to start the process with the capacitation of the
future coaches.
The first “Training-of-Coaches” (TOC) was organised
as a two week process, where the professional staff of our UNESCO Media
Development Project visited with the three coaches two distinctively
different community radio stations in two different parts of the
country, demonstrating one very simple, bamboo-hut like station with
rudimentary equipment, broadcasting some 8 hours a day through
programmes, primarily directly on-air, to a vastly rural community. The
other was a station in a middle sized town, with more equipment, a
higher level of internal organisation, more daily programming hours and
more pre-produced programmes.
During the TOC study trip, long internal discussion
sessions on how to turn national and international community radio
experience effectively into workable formats in the Mozambican reality,
interchanged with meetings with the local station managers, volunteers,
community members, providing the project and our coaches with the
opportunity to listen and learn.
On this basis each of our coaches started to work
approximately 30 hours per month in “their” communities, besides
continuing their primary work with the public broadcaster. One of these
coaches lived in the community in question, and worked with the
installation committee every Wednesday evening and with the growing
group of volunteers every Saturday morning. Another one of the coaches
lived some 4 hours away by boat and bus, and found with her community
the best rhythm to be working together every Saturday. The third coach,
needing to travel some 8-10 hours by train each way, agreed with her
community to work every second weekend, from her arrival Friday
afternoon and until Sunday evening.
In order for the project to
closely follow developments and progress made, we installed a monitoring
system including weekly telephone conferences on a set time with each of
the coaches, and the receipt by us of a monthly written report. This
report served at least four purposes: it forced the coach to reflect on
developments month by month, to present and assess the activities
carried out, to describe and justify the plans for the coming month and
to discuss the main problems and challenges, including areas where
assistance was needed from us, UNESCO. Secondly it was our tool to
monitor progress, and to ensure that the processes in each of the three
and – since December 2000 – nine
communities was still on track. Thirdly the report was our proof that
the coach had been working, and the coach only received his/her monthly
honorarium upon approval of the report. Finally, the report served the
purpose of documenting this important and – to our knowledge –
innovative community mobilisation and training work-process, carried out
in preparation of community ownership of a radio station. We are
presently having a book prepared based on the first one hundred monthly
reports from December 1999 and until July 2001.
Besides these weekly and monthly monitoring
exercises, we carried out bi-annual evaluation seminars, first with
three and since December 2000 with nine coaches. These seminars lasted
between two and four days, and covered a combination of exchange of
experience, assessment of successes and failures during the past six
months, planning for the coming six months and further refinement of our
work methods in each of the participating communities.
Like the first three coaches, also four of the six
new coaches were recruited from the national public radio. The fifth
one comes from a catholic community oriented radio station and the sixth
from a community development NGO. With one regrettable exception the
coaches have all lived up to and even exceeded our high personal,
ethical and professional expectations, and they have all worked much
more than what is covered by their symbolic thirty monthly hours’ pay.
They were in charge of not only training, but also of mobilisation and
the facilitation of organisational development processes. During the
bi-annual evaluation seminars they expressed that working as a coach
required that they use all they have ever learnt, tried, heard – and
more. Two of the three first coaches were after two years promoted by
their employer – the public broadcaster - to become heads of their local
delegations. Both attributed this professional and personal development
in part to the very creative, demanding and rewarding coach experience.
Once the stations will be up and running, we have
designed a model – discussed in more detail below – where large groups
of volunteers support only four paid staff members who run the station:
the Co-ordinator, the Administrator, the Technician, and finally, the
Mobiliser. It is our plan that this latter person will work closely
together and finally take over the functions of the coach. Together with
the Co-ordinator, the Mobiliser will be responsible to organise and
manage the volunteer programmers, continually mobilise the communities
within the community to provide programmers, and in general to support
the station. Further tasks will comprise an effective system of
training and capacitation activities, as well as continued and effective
ways of absorbing new volunteers in the life and work of the station.
With this scheme in place, the crucial question still
was how to turn the themes of the many sessions into a real life
context. Most of the participants had never seen a radio studio, and had
only a faint idea of what it could look like. It was therefore found
important to couple the formal courses and the work of the coaches, with
some exposure to ‘radio station realities’ – as diverse and different as
possible.
While intense training courses provide in-depth
understanding of a specific subject, and the weekly coach-sessions
provide a broad-based insight into community radio programming and work
methods, the need for the community member to understand how this all
can be turned into one working organism still prevails.
Therefore, as an important part of our training and
capacitation strategy we encouraged – and often actively planned and
organised – visits to as many other related realities as possible, in
order for our community radio back-bone, the volunteers and ‘owners’, to
find themselves in a position, where they can choose between different –
not just theoretic, but real life - models, seen, experienced and
discussed with colleagues.
Some study visits were thus paid to the public
broadcaster, Radio Mozambique – usually one of its eight provincial
delegations, that belong closely to the public broadcaster, but are in a
process of some, gradual decentralisation in specific areas. Other
visits led to more community oriented radios, of which presently no less
than four different types exist: community radios initiated by the state
communication institute (7 so-called community stations and 14 rural
radio and TV stations), the catholic community oriented stations (5 in
the country), the independent, community-association based radios, and
one single municipal community radio station.
Another interesting model to visit and to measure
dreams and plans against are the other religious radios that have
developed a mix between commercial broadcasting and missionary messages.
Finally, one of the two known politically driven local radio stations,
that also applies the commercial radio format, was visited by one of our
groups.
In order to learn yet more on basic organisational
development and functional structures for sustainability, we encouraged
some of our community groups - besides visiting other radio stations -
to liaise closely with other civic organisations. This also opened
their eyes to the fact that within their own communities, or nearby,
they may find organisations that – while quite different from radio
development groups - possess much of the capacity for sustainability
that our communities will need in their further development processes.
As emanates from the description above, our capacity
building strategy builds on a continuous assessment of the ever changing
needs for specific capacity-building activities that become visible
through specifically commissioned consultancies, the monthly,
analytically geared reports from our process coaches, and not least our
almost daily contact with the community management committees and the
staff of the stations.
On the basis if this continuous needs assessment, a
number of special, tailor-made and need-driven management seminars and
workshops were developed. Examples comprise the revamping and
strengthening of financial systems, devising an effective and efficient
organisation structure and work flow, co-ordination between the many
editorial groups of volunteer programmers, among others. They are
implemented between three and five times per year for the management
committees of the radio stations (the ‘real’ managers), the
co-ordinators of the stations with the administrator or the mobiliser,
depending upon the special focus of the different sessions.
Towards the end of 2001, our partner stations are
planed to be on air. At that time we plan to designate one of the
stations that is somewhat better organised, structured and capacitated,
to function as a training station. This does in no way mean ‘training
centre’, nor does it mean that it will carry out any kind of training
activities as such.
What we are aiming at is a station, where the core
team of a new station – or a station undergoing re-structuring – can
come and “double” the functions of the existing staff members. The core
idea is to get “under the skin” how the routine interaction makes the
station work: who does what, when, with whom, and with what consequences
for the (well) functioning of the everyday of the radio station. This
means that the future, visiting co-ordinator closely follows the
resident co-ordinator in his/her daily work functions, where the future,
visiting administrator does the same with the administrator, where the
mobiliser follows the work routines of the mobiliser; and the technician
works with the technician. The (only) prerequisite for an effective
training station is thus that its co-ordinator and staff have the
willingness and capacity to receive such teams, and are able to explain
their daily routines and chosen work methodologies while working.
The visiting team should stay between 2 and 3 weeks,
and ensure time for analytical assessments of what they are seeing, what
they want to copy, and what not. A facilitator should be attached to
these analytical sessions.
The effect of this “stay” naturally is beyond what
formal, in-depth, but specialised training courses can give, beyond what
the coach can provide, much more and much more detailed and targeted
than what a study visit can provide and very different from the effect
of a management seminar or workshop. A stay at the training station
will thus effectively complement the other parts of our training and
capacitation strategy.
While the relevant and effective community content is
the core of any Community Radio all over the world, nothing will get on
air without the technical part of the magic being in place. In a country
like Mozambique, the importance of this cannot be exaggerated. Many of
the community radios we looked at in our initial assessment phase were
off the air because of a combination of factors that surfaced due to
insufficient technical planning. Such factors included inadequate
technical overall configurations of the stations that were not geared to
the specific local conditions but were provided as pre-prepared packages
from different donors; inadequately prepared local staff without any
particular (preventive) maintenance skills or routines; insufficient
funds to cater for upcoming technical problems; and insufficient
community mobilisation that would ensure community backing in times of
trouble.
In an attempt to learn from the sad and painful
experiences in Mozambique and in its neighbouring countries, we decided
to opt for a vast set of different conditions that had to be in place,
in order to avoid repeating the worst of the existing past experiences.
With respect to the configuration of the studios it
was necessary to relate carefully to today’s discussions of using
semi-professional or not quite as robust equipment (maybe) of obscure
origin, thinking of a throw-away-and-buy-new philosophy, against a more
traditional quality-oriented attitude. Whereas the economic aspects of
the technically weaker options might seem advantageous to a country in a
financial situation like Mozambique, the consequences are totally
un-appealing: it is not possible in the local market to buy the
(cheaper) substitutes, nor is it easy to import them into the country,
where formalities, procedures and bureaucracy is prohibitive. These
factors are prone to result in late arrival of equipment, less than
interesting end-prices and increased vulnerability to equipment failure
and non-replacement.
In the Mozambican situation the configuration
therefore rather needs to look for sturdiness, standard brands with
spare-parts easily accessible, ease of preventive maintenance and
compatability with other brands, simplicity and, if at all possible, two
studios per radio station, putting less immediate pressure on one on-air
studio.
As Mozambique also lacks qualified repair
technicians, it is furthermore necessary to look for suppliers from
neighbouring countries who are more than sales-people. They must not
only be ready to provide an adequate after sale service, but also to
provide the necessary initial training of the staff members responsible
for the operation and of all station members in (preventive)
maintenance.
Finally, none of the above will have the needed
impact, without the station (management committee and executive body)
having put into place precise policies, regulations, and resulting basic
rules in the many different areas of work, including the technical area,
such as: who has access to what equipment upon what level of training
and insight. Who is responsible for the weekly, the monthly, the
semi-annual, the annual preventive maintenance routines. And: when
break-downs occur, who carries out which diagnostic, methodical
routines, and with which sequence of reactions and connections?
To prepare the community programmers and technicians
to this reality we devised the following sequence of training and
capacitation actions in the technical area: First of all a formal
training course (see above, 2.1) was organised in Preventive
Maintenance, that also focused on the identification of needed community
station policies, which had to be detailed in regulations, that in turn
could be specified into basic rules to be posted in the station. This
course further comprised an introduction to the most basic technical
equipment operation rules and methods, focusing on the prevention of
problems as well as front-line maintenance, including basic diagnostic
routines. Due to its important management component, both the core
technician and the (future) co-ordinator of the station were requested
to be among the 3-5 persons from each station that participated in the
course.
The second part of the technical capacitation
process was to send the main technician from each of the stations to
Cape Town. There, these technicians were guided through a ten day
intensive process of “learning-by-doing” through which they built up
their own future studios. In this way – besides from feeling very much
as the ‘owner’ of and responsible for the equipment - they came to know
the role and importance of practically every screw, and learned how to
take good care of the specific equipment as well as basic (preventive)
maintenance procedures.
After the visit in Cape Town, the next step was for
the staff and volunteers above mentioned, as well as other staff
foreseen to be active within the technical area – maximum ten persons –
to install the studio together with the installation technicians coming
from Cape Town to set up the equipment in the community. During this
practical installation-cum-training process, the local group of
technicians will be working with a technical manual, which the supplier
has developed specifically for each individual studio, and which
describes for each of the machines and software the most important
operation and maintenance details. Translated into Portuguese by UNESCO
in Mozambique, this manual is meant to be the daily operations and
preventive maintenance handbook in each of the stations.
The fourth and final part of the technical package
within the first phase of the UNESCO Media Development Project, was a
continued, and more in-depth, level II Preventive Maintenance training
course, foreseen to be held when the eight stations have used the
equipment for some months. By then, the users and technicians will have
identified the first problems, which will allow them to benefit
maximally from the training provided.
With the carefully composed equipment packages,
configured to match the individual situations, climates and conditions
maximally, and this technical capacitation process in place, it is
expected and hoped that the stations will be able to prevent a major
part of the initial technical problems identified during our early
technical assessments of the community radio environment in the country.
For the technical problems that still will occur, a system needs to be
in place.
We are therefore presently planning the
establishment - within the realm of a newly established national
co-ordination network of community radio stations (state, catholic and
independent) – of a national network of technicians at different levels
of documented maintenance and repair capacity. This network will need
to be prepared and oriented in a way that ensures its sustainability.
Some of the equipment suppliers from neighbouring countries are
considering to become involved in such a network, which could help to
build a sustainability potential. However, we are still at the initial
steps of this process and still need to find adequate ways of turning
this idea realistic, operational, and viable in a long-term perspective.
4
Looking to the Future in Anxious Expectation
Through the preparatory measures described above,
UNESCO has in Mozambique aimed at ensuring that the community itself
forms part of the creators, movers and active beneficiaries of an
appropriate knowledge-based local development. Based on the
empowerment we have seen take seat in and among our partners, we trust
and believe that the above combination of a multitude of training and
capacitation responses, carefully designed to mutually reinforce each
other, is one part of the response to the complex and persisting
challenges at hand. A major one among these is the challenge to ensure
that communities and the individuals therein are capacitated to provide
and find access to information that enables them to take informed
decisions and proactively take control of their own lives.
When on air, the stations will have four paid staff
members: the co-ordinator, the administrator, the mobiliser and the
technician. Besides of this, the volunteers will be organised in
editorial groups, preparing adequate community programmes in their area
of specialisation (health, education, culture, agriculture, environment,
youth, women, etc.) through a combination of pre-prepared parts of the
programme that give them time to go in-depth with the issues, and
further on-air discussions of the themes.
To encourage this way of getting in-depth with the
issues, all stations – even the technically more modest ones – have both
a pre-production studio and an on-air studio, facilitating the work of
the between 5 and 15 editorial groups organised and active in each of
our partner communities. These studios provide in most instances of a
combination of analogue and digital equipment, which renders them
flexibility, stability and future orientation.
In order to ensure a continued, coherent programme
profile development, and mutual, continued training, all stations have
developed a work rhythm, where an overall weekly editorial meeting
discusses and evaluates the programmes of the past week, and comments on
the initial preparation of the programmes for the coming week.
Mozambique needs functioning, community based and
community controlled media for long-term social, economic,
cultural and politic development. Above I have presented a number of the
crucial sustainability factors which we identified and for which we
attempted to define a series of adequate, working responses. We will
need to continue to carefully monitor the development, and to find
adequate and creative responses to the arising needs by developing a
range of diverse models and experiences that work.
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