Always innovating: Resources for broadcasters

Salome Thomas sits behind the controls at Orkonerei Radio Service in northern Tanzania.

Salome Thomas sits behind the controls at Orkonerei Radio Service in northern Tanzania.
Since 1979, we’ve been serving our broadcasters with resources to help them produce high-quality radio programs that serve their small-scale farmers. Nearly 40 years later, we’re doing the same work, but in new and innovative ways. Here are six innovations we have brought to our “Broadcaster Resources” portfolio.

    • We continue to produce our Farm Radio Resource Packs several times a year. These packs include interview and drama scripts, as well as information documents and broadcaster how-to guides. We circulate them by email to 2,000+ broadcasters. But now we also circulate monthly theme packs, which gather scripts, information documents and our Farmer Stories on a single topic, and share these with broadcasters, making it even easier for them to research a topic, find inspiration, and present it on their farm radio programs.

 

    • This year we hosted our fifth online eDiscussion, bringing together more than 100 broadcasters from across Africa to talk about their successes and challenges with generating revenue for their farm radio programs. This year we asked our broadcasting partners to choose what topics they wanted to dig into during the four-week web-based discussion, and they chose three: knowing your audience; diversifying sources of revenue; and using social media to generate revenue.

 

    • Generating revenue is an important topic for farm radio programs at stations of all sizes. We developed a broadcaster how-to guide on the topic as well as an online learning module (in French) to guide broadcasters through some key questions and elements of financing a radio program.

 

    • Some things you just have to hear to understand. We have been producing broadcaster how-to guides about a variety of good radio skills, and these tip sheets are our most popular resource. This year we produced our first audio version—about Promos—so that broadcasters could hear examples. This audio Broadcaster how-to guide was produced in English, Swahili and Amharic.

 

    • We have made it even easier for broadcasters to access all of our resources by developing a new webpage: www.farmradio.fm. From here you can find Barza Wire, (our online agricultural news service) as well as our Farm Radio Resource Packs, Training documents, and eDiscussions. All of the information about FRI’s work is still available at www.farmradio.org.

 

  • To give broadcasters some ideas on how to find and use our resources, we conducted a webinar — in French and English. This was the first webinar we hosted for African radio broadcasters and the recordings are available on our Youtube page as a resource for broadcasters to refer to.

 

Esdras Mivimba is a broadcaster with Radio Refference Komanda in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He told us, “Congratulations for all the information that you make available for farmers and rural communities in general. Radio Refference Komanda has already started a program using the Barza Wire stories and other information from Farm Radio.”

 

We continue to develop new information and training resources, and to deliver them in new ways, so that broadcasters can access and use them in their radio programming. With a network of 700 broadcasting partners, we help millions of farmers have access to high-quality radio programs.

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