Global Media Musings: August 2008

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal about six years ago. While six years is almost a technological eternity in the U.S., the availability of community radio to serve listeners in transitional countries remains relevant social issue. When was the last time you listened to the radio for anything other than music?

Look at the key issues that explain why radio is still vital as an information source? What are some of the reasons? What else do we know about life in Niger today?

Air Lift: The Radio Offers Africans Rare Aid In Tune With Needs --- In Impoverished Niger, Stations Provide the Missing Links Needed for Development --- Better Than Word of Mouth
By Roger Thurow
2,470 words
10 May 2002
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

AMATALTAL, Niger -- "Hello."

The word floated on the desert airwaves to the Tuareg herdsmen, as mysterious and alluring as a mirage. In their flowing blue robes and turbans, swords dangling at their sides, the men strained to hear more.

"You are listening to Radio Afalla," came next in their Tamachek language. "This is your radio station."

These first words over the Tuaregs' radios originated in a two-room mud-brick hut on the edge of this Sahara village. Outside, a red-and-white antenna jutted some 70 feet above the parched earth, the tallest object for miles in this flat desert expanse of sand and sparse, spindly scrub. Solar panels powered a car battery linked by wires to a compact console of two tape players, two compact-disc players and one microphone. Many of the radio receivers the Tuaregs cradled to their ears were hand-crank models or secondhand transistorized relics from the 1960s.

This is a far cry from the digital technology that connects other parts of the world. But in a country of staggering poverty -- 80% adult illiteracy, 45-year life expectancy, and pockets where 40% of the children die before the age of five -- progress is coming not on the wings of 21st-century inventions but through a discovery from the 19th.

"With radio, we are getting to know the world," says Radio Afalla broadcaster Adam Habiboun outside the studio, which went on the air in March. Camels and donkeys meander past on their way to a nearby watering hole.

About 40 community stations have blossomed in the Niger desert after a recent rainfall of funding from an array of aid organizations. The local DJs are nomads and desert dwellers themselves. Music is only the background to the childbirth advice, vaccination updates, sanitation instruction, farming tips, candid talk on AIDS, and the occasional all-points-bulletin for lost camels.

"We have learned how we should wash utensils before cooking, clean the area where we eat and prepare food, cover the food with cloth to keep the flies away," says Essa Hassana, who is sitting with three other women in the village of Ingall, 100 miles farther north into the desert. Ingall's simple studio struggles to hold back the Sahara. Sand covers the floor, and lizards seeking shade scamper up the walls.

"As soon as a child gets an illness that can be spread, the radio puts out the information," says Zeinou Sami, another of the women. "Now we have fewer epidemics than before. Fewer children are dying."

Such progress has often eluded this harsh country, which is one of the world's poorest patches. The relics of many high-minded, high-tech development projects litter Niger like the dinosaur bones occasionally discovered beneath the shifting sands. Sophisticated irrigation systems that work well with First World maintenance turned into rusted pipes in Niger. The European cows that were supposed to improve milk production keeled over in the heat. Computers that launch villages elsewhere into cyberspace were grounded here, awaiting spare parts and support know-how -- not to mention electricity and telephone connections in a country with only 18,000 telephone lines for 11 million people.

Digging through these ruins, development experts from the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of aid organizations have discovered what their critics suspected for years: Rarely had anyone asked the villagers of Niger what they needed and what would work in their merciless environment. More rarely still did anyone put the locals in charge and leave the project in their hands.

"In the past, people weren't hearing each other," says Geoffrey Bergen, who taught English in Niger as a Peace Corps worker and now is the World Bank's country manager here. "We came to the point that we knew we had to listen better."

Radio "is the missing link in the development chain," says Steven Ursino, director of the United Nations Development Program, or UNDP, in Niger. With its manageable, cheap technology, it goes to places the Internet can't, beyond the reach of electricity and telephones. It demands the participation of the villagers and can become the soul of a community. Above all, it stimulates communication in the local languages that is vital in attacking problems such as AIDS. "It gives the people a voice," Mr. Ursino says.

After Sept. 11, the stakes are higher to get things right and show progress in development. From the White House and the World Bank and the U.N. have come pledges to extend the war on terrorism to a war on global poverty and the instability it breeds.

Niger, where shortages of medical supplies sometimes mean hospital patients must bring their own material for sutures, figures it should be on the front line. "If they are serious about what they are saying, then they should support us," says Hadiza Hima, the secretary general of the Ministry of Education, which is battling the world's worst literacy rate. "Every five years we hear new commitments, but nothing is done."

According to the UNDP's Human Development Report, which ranks the well-being of the world's countries, Niger is one place from the bottom, ahead of Sierra Leone, a fellow West African nation that has been mutilated by civil war. By some standards, Niger is worse off now than 20 years ago. Demand for its uranium has shrunk and two coups in the 1990s crippled government services. International development aid dropped to about $190 million last year from $270 million in 1990.

For the past two years, though, the country has been peaceful, with an elected government pledging to decentralize its operations and spread development aid around the country to quell discontent. This has prompted an increase in foreign aid and encouraged agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations Children's Fund to intensify their consultations with the rural communities. And this, in turn, is allowing village radio to take hold in the sand.

The Niger government, a new convert to rural development, has cautiously embraced the radio network. At last month's inauguration of four stations, including the one in Amataltal, Aboubakar Souley, the secretary general of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, told the villagers that the station is not to broadcast politics or religion. "For once you start with that," he says, "you divide the population and then you can't use the radio for development anymore." The stations are members of a self-regulatory body that promotes broadcasting ethics and adherence to the no-politics code.

This concern that the stations could become propaganda conduits reflects Niger's position at the confluence of poverty, religion and geopolitics. It shares vast borders with Libya and Algeria to the north and Nigeria to the south. Sharia, or Islamic law, has been implemented in parts of northern Nigeria, and the Niger government is trying to keep it from moving farther north.

Although more than 90% of Niger's population is Muslim, the government is secular and insists it won't brook any extremist movements. The country's leaders turned up at the U.S. Embassy after Sept. 11 to condemn the terrorist attacks in America. But so did a letter from two Islamic organizations, warning Washington of a jihad should Osama bin Laden or Afghanistan be attacked. The government immediately dissolved both organizations.

"Poverty is connected to everything," says Amirou Garba Sidikou, secretary general of the Council of Traditional Chiefs, local leaders who hold considerable sway over village life. "We are a tolerant Muslim country. But people who are poor will do anything."

In Amataltal, Arahmat Koutchan leads the way into the Radio Afalla station, which is festooned with decals of two of its main donors: the U.S. Agency for International Development and U.S.-based Africare.

"This is our future, and I'm very optimistic," she says. She is the director of the station and proudly shows off the new mud-brick studio to a caravan of representatives from aid agencies and embassies who have come for the inauguration. "Education, health, food, child care, news," she says, ticking off the subjects featured during the six-and-half hours of daily airtime.

Djilali Benamrane, a UNDP economist in Niger, hears this and thinks back to the origins of the first station three years ago. He was assessing a food shortage in the town of Bankilare when he heard a strange request from villagers. "I was talking with a group of women, asking them what help they needed, and they started laughing," he recalls. "They thought it would be impossible, but they said they were dreaming of the day they could have a radio station, not so they could be in touch with Paris or Niamey, Niger's capital, but to be in contact with the neighboring villages."

Months later, with UNDP funding and the simple technology provided by the African Center of Meteorological Applications for Development based in Niamey, their dream became the model for rural radio in Niger. Other groups have signed on to fund the stations, forming a broad coalition that includes various U.N. agencies and the World Bank, aid organizations such as Africare and Helen Keller International, and foreign governments such as the U.S., France and Switzerland.

The stations cost about $15,000 each to equip and build. Fueled by solar power, they are cheap to operate and maintain. Each station has about a dozen workers -- broadcasters and technicians -- who are volunteers from the local communities. Once trained, they then train others. The goal of the development agencies is to have a network of 160 stations, each with a broadcast radius of about 20 miles, by the end of 2004.

The Amataltal station was on the air after five months of work, with the community pitching in on construction and set-up. On a clear morning last month, the villagers gathered for the official inauguration. They came on camel and donkey and foot. The Tuareg men in their blue robes formed a reception line that looked like a flowing stream. The women, in colorful gowns, sat astride decorated donkeys or sang and played bongo drums. The children gathered at their feet. The village chief, Akanamwa Hosseini, had ordered up a feast of roast lamb, noodles and camel cheese.

"This is the first time we have ever had radio that we can understand," Mr. Hosseini said. On the rare days when the national signal from Niamey, 600 miles to the south, would float their way, it came in languages foreign to the local residents, he said: "Now people around here are forming listening clubs, where they share a radio, to listen and discuss. We even get feedback."

Already, the chief said, people are asking for more overseas news shows, such as Voice of America, broadcast in the local language andpicked up by the World Space satellite receiver that comes as part of the radio station. And, he said, people are already planning to set up businesses around the station, such as vegetable-drying ovens and millet grinders.

Throughout the country, activity is stirring beneath the red-and-white antennas. In Dogondoutchi, Aichatou Garba sat in the sand holding a pan over a fire, a battered red plastic radio at her side. She said she was inspired to start a small business after listening to programs about what women in other villages were doing. She was making millet pancakes to sell in the market. "The radio says it is important to have high quality and good presentation," she noted.

In Ingall, a town of about 6,000 people, dozens of listening clubs have formed around the radios. Programs on AIDS and the health perils of early childbirth spark freewheeling discussions. And they unify the community on important days, as when a vaccination team comes to town. Before radio, vaccination schedules were unreliably passed on by word of mouth. "Now, we know exactly when they are coming, because the radio follows them from house to house. We can make sure we are present," says Ms. Hassana. A radio reporter even tapes this conversation with a beat-up recorder, for broadcast later in the day.

One of the first stations, the "voice of the youth" of Niamey, was built in a ramshackle neighborhood beyond the capital's Embassy Row. Radio Goudel has since become the hub of the network. Here, much of the programming on development issues provided by the aid organizations is translated into the nine main languages of the country and recorded on tape, as are talk shows. These tapes are then dispatched to the other stations when someone is heading in their direction.

At Radio Goudel, the digital divide between Niger and the developed world opens wide. In one room of the station, several computers are covered by plastic sheets, rendered useless by a lack of spare parts. In the next room, technicians from stations around the country learn how to repair the simple wind-up radios from the Freeplay Foundation of London, which is mainly funded by the Freeplay Energy Group, maker of the self-powered products. The radios have a mainspring that drives a small generator as it unwinds, and some also have a small solar panel.

The caravan of aid officials that visited Amataltal pulls into the remote mountain oasis of El Meki and is greeted by an honor guard of Tuaregs on camels. There are no marked roads, or even any local cars. But there is now a radio station, and it is becoming the center of village life. Often, one of the broadcasters wanders into the primary school to record what is going on in the classrooms. Currently, only about one-third of the village children go to school; the rest are out tending goats or cattle, hauling water or foraging for food.

"Radio is the best promotion ever for school. The children sing and joke and explain to other children listening why they should also go to school," says the principal, Abdube Adamou. "I'm expecting many more students to sign up once we begin classes again in the fall."

In the dusty expanse between the school and the station, a Tuareg sits in the shade of a tree, a sword across his lap and an ear cocked to an old transistor radio.

What is he listening to?

"It's a health program," says Ekawel Ibrahim, who, at 43, is pushing the envelope on life expectancy here. "It's about precautions for keeping the drinking water clean."

Is he learning anything new?

"If I wasn't," he says, "I would turn it off."

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Monday, August 25, 2008

Radio Niger

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