Community radio can help disseminate good health education, and is even more effective when the listeners have the opportunity to participate
Ruth Shumba is a 28-year-old mother of four who lives in Mchinji district, Malawi. Until recently, many women in her village used traditional herbs during pregnancy, not knowing that this led to premature deliveries and other complications. Most women were attended in childbirth by unskilled traditional birth helpers. HIV/
AIDS was an important issue that was seldom discussed, even between husbands and wives. Lack of information about maternal and child health was literally a life and death issue.
In 2009, Mrs Shumba and her local women’s group began tuning into a radio programme about women’s health issues. After listening together, the women would discuss the information. Gradually, they began making changes. Today she talks about health issues with her children. She and her husband went for HIV testing together. Mrs Shumba reports that local women have stopped taking the herbs that provoked birth complications. And more women are choosing to give birth at a local health facility staffed by skilled personnel. Fewer pregnant women, mothers and children are dying in her community as the health information spreads.
These dramatic changes have occurred because of a single series of radio programmes. Such is the power of community media for learning. Throughout the developing world, community media is increasingly being used to address vital learning needs and development issues, including health. This is non-formal learning that takes place outside traditional institutions and within the context of everyday life. Without the captive audience of a formal structured system or school, community learning relies to a great degree on dialogue as the basic model for education. It’s a different take on the teacher-student relationship that positions learners as active participants, an intrinsic part of the back-and-forth exchange among people and groups that builds mutual understanding and knowledge.
When the focus is health or livelihoods, people also need to be part of the actions that the learning aims to enable as part of a larger process of development. As community members, learners need to be involved in identifying issues and making decisions about the conversation in the first place. What will it be about? Who will be involved? How will it be organised? How will it end?
Community media is community first and media second; in other words, where education and development are concerned, the technology is always secondary to the community’s sense of ownership and how people participate in the process. This type of media is well positioned to facilitate learning about important issues such as health. It functions locally, generally at a relatively small scale and often on the margins. Content usually deals with local issues. Broadcasting uses local dialects. Overall, community media operates as part of the local cultural contexts and, for the most part, reaches only local audiences.
Community-based communication – be it cable TV, community radio or the internet – depends on community members, not just as the audience but also as contributors in creating content and in translating what’s learnt into action.
The Commonwealth of Learning’s regional agency in India, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia, is working with the Department of Science and Technology on an interactive radio series that reaches an estimated 12,000 people, mostly women. The programmes focus on health and nutrition. This is a participatory process that includes the students andlistening communities. The women learn radio production skills and create relevant content using information provided by university partners. In addition to providing valuable health information, ‘Science for Women’s Health and Nutrition’ is creating a bank of content that can be re-used. Women are gaining skills as announcers, interviewers and writers, which become a new source of earning a livelihood.
In Mrs Shumba’s community in Malawi, community groups, media and health authorities are working together on a learning programme about maternal and child health, ‘Phukusi la Moyo’ (literally ‘bag of life’). The radio programmes are meant to be a source from which people can draw to fill their bags of life and safeguard mother and child health. It is a collaboration among local communities, MaiMwana Trust (a maternal and child health non-governmental organisation), Mchinji District Health Office, Mudzi Wathu community radio station, Story Workshop (an educational media production group) and the Commonwealth of Learning. At the centre of the programme is the MaiMwana network of 200 women’s groups dedicated to reducing maternal and child mortality. The associations play a key role in designing the radio programmes and they meet each week to discuss the content.
This step – coming together in listening groups – is a critical factor in the success of ‘Phukusi la Moyo’ because this is where the women turn the information into knowledge – and action.
Similar programmes exist in other countries. Community radio and drama productions have raised awareness about important issues such as the relationship between health and the environment in the Solomon Islands and diabetes in Belize, as well as HIV/AIDS in Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania.
The key is participation: communities need to be actively involved in identifying the issues, choosing appropriate media, creating the content and being the audience. When community members participate actively, they are engaged – not just as an audience but also as learners and community members. They are participants in both the programmes and the mobilising.
