My presentation is particularly addressed to our American colleagues here at the Workshop, in order to explain to them what we've been doing in Africa. I'm one of your neighbors, being from Quebec, and I've worked all of my life in community media, mainly radio and television.
For ten years, I worked with the American Indian and Eskimo populations, and have always been a staff member, rather than a producer of radio programming. I've always been a civil servant, and have helped to produce programmes for communities, in the area of communication development.
I've worked for some thirty years with the French-speaking countries of Africa, and we've had rural radio systems in place there for some time. Most of these rural radio stations used to belong to the national radio service of these countries, and this situation still exists in some cases, where you can have a local, or a regional, or a central broadcasting system operating.
The Germans, Canadians and Dutch people have been involved in these operations, and we have had considerable cooperation from abroad over the years.
Two phenomena have changed, however, perhaps as a result of decentralization. Africans themselves have noted that the radio networks are often too far removed from the rural milieu to really be aware of what farmers are thinking, and the national broadcasting services have devoted so little time to addressing the problems of the different ethnic groups.
After all, there are over 250 different languages in some of these countries. Guinea was mentioned in this regard yesterday, and they have federal languages there, perhaps four or five, but in other countries, you have enormous variety, so you can only broadcast in these languages for a few minutes each week.
Our African colleagues had been telling us that it would be extraordinary if the radio broadcasting that we were trying to achieve could be closer to the local populations, and deal with a much smaller area. This led, briefly, to our concept of a local, rural radio system, with the added value of promoting the local languages.
The situation then underwent some change, when the foreign persons who had been active in certain countries began to leave. This was the case in Burkina Faso, for example, when the large contingent of German reporters and technical personnel who had been producing excellent rural radio programming finally left, and the local people took over.
Obviously, it is very difficult for a local group to "take over" a project that had been created and prepared by a foreign organization.
Gradually then, certain foreign cooperation groups, having observed the first experiences of local rural radio stations, decided to begin supporting these smaller-scale projects, that would be closer to the local populations, rather than funding large projects, with huge staffs, and much higher costs.
In addition, this would encourage the local people to contribute to the funding, and above all, the staffing of these radio stations.
Consequently, there are quite a few co-operative projects of this nature under way at the present time, all of them concentrated on local, rural radio. Many of these projects involve the providing of training for local people, while others deal with network building, supplying programmes that can be shared. At the present time, I am responsible for a project involving the setting up of local radio stations, around fifty of them, to be exact.
It is often upsetting for me to hear criticism of radio stations as being very poor, with insufficiently trained personnel, and mediocre programming. Obviously, there have been serious problems in this area, but this is not the entire picture.
The success rates for many of these stations, in Mali for example, are fairly high. The local communities obviously need these stations and their programming, and there is great pressure on the people working in these services.
Mr. da Matha will continue along these same lines, and give you a different view of the same type of problem.
