Sebrina V. Cleteis is a 25 year old upland farmer with three children. She lives with tribal Filipinos at the buffer zone of the Kanan River Watershed in the Sierra Madre mountain range. Her parents were upland migrants who worked for huge logging corporations many years ago. When the government withdrew the logging concessions and her parents passed away, Sebrina was left to till the land to feed her family. Sebrina's husband hunts wild animals and catches fish for food. He also cuts wood for fuel. While her husband takes care of the soil preparation and transplanting, Sebrina does the rest of the farm work. Additionally, in order to make ends meet, Sebrina does laundry work for some of the rich families in town. However, going to town involves one day of walking and a one-hour jeepney ride that costs the equivalent of a quarter of the daily salary earned washing clothes. When she heard about the DZJO's1 agriculture programme on the radio, Sebrina decided to enrol as an individual student listener. Sebrina is just one of hundreds of student listeners of the radio school's agriculture programme. The school on-the-air also has a health programme which she tunes in to every week.
“If it were not for DZJO, the school on-the-air, I would not have known that planting rice and vegetables does not require the use of expensive chemicals. Now I have more food at less expense. I am able to feed my family without having to buy from commercial producers. Oftentimes, I even sell my own produce to my neighbours in the village. And if my surplus is plentiful, I go and sell them in town. I realised that food is more important than money. Secure food for your family before you sell your produce' was what I learned from the radio school. Though we are poor, we are rich in natural resources with which we are deeply connected. We have to take good care of nature so it will provide us with more food. Before the training, I used to spend a day just walking to town. There, I would wash clothes for one or two days. Out of my earnings, I could buy a kilo of rice. Then I walked back to my village - another day's travel. These trips to buy food are a thing of the past. Now, whenever I go to town, it is to sell my produce and to purchase tools, seeds, radio batteries and other household needs. When my baby was sick, it was the health tips discussed on DZJO that kept her alive. If not for the radio programme, my baby would have died of diarrhoea. The radio has become our window to the world. It is my constant companion. It makes me cry, laugh, pray and learn many useful things in life.”
1 DZJO is a radio station operated by the Bayanihan Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Aida Malandog is a lowland farmer, aged 41 years. Following an accident five years ago which permanently disabled her fisherman husband, she became the sole breadwinner of her family of eleven children. Aida is a tenant in the lowland village of Maypulot, Infanta, Quezon. She tills a one hectare rice field and manages a 400 square metre biointensive garden. Aida enrolled in the DZJO on-the-air school. She also graduated from a four-month long farmers' field school on ecological pest management. Now Aida and her eleven children are learning specialised agriculture technology. Together they comprise a household learners' group. Aida is very pleased that, in addition to herself, three of her younger children have written to the radio school to respond to some questions discussed on the programme. The radio school has truly given her renewed hope in farming and life. Aida is now an active woman leader in the community. In her own words, during an interview for the radio school's evaluation survey, Aida had the following to say:
“Despite the poverty and misfortunes that I went through, the radio school has shown me the importance and value of life, that of others and of my own. DZJO taught me to care for and to manage the natural resource base adequately, to form a humanistic system of values, and to give importance to caring and concern for the community. Before I enrolled with the radio school, I applied four litres of pesticides and five sacks of mineral fertilisers to what I planted. But after undergoing training, no drop of pesticides has ever touched my plants. I have reduced my use of inorganic fertilisers to only one and a half sacks of urea. Perhaps by next year, I will be able to use organic fertilisers alone. Through the radio programme, I have also learned the best biointensive gardening techniques. This garden ensures a continuous supply of food for my family. When it comes to decision making, I have learned to analyse the why's and how's in planting and tilling. The radio school has encouraged me to analyse different methods of agriculture, different problems and different solutions which we discovered as a learners' group with the guidance of the facilitator. I also had the chance to share my own indigenous knowledge and discoveries in natural farming. I am happy to have helped other people by sharing what I know.”
The experiences of Sebrina and Aida illustrate some of the benefits which radio school has reaped for the rural poor across the Philippines. Sebrina and Aida are only two among thousands of rural Filipino women who have profited from distance education programmes using radio broadcast media. As Sebrina illustrated the radio has become the window to the world for many poor people. It has reached and helped people who are impoverished, ill and isolated, as well as minorities who have tended to be ignored and neglected.
Three-quarters of the world's poor (1.3 billion people) live in rural areas of the Asian and Pacific region (ESCAP, Poverty Alleviation Initiatives, April–June 1998). Moreover despite the decline in the incidence of absolute poverty in Asia and the Pacific in the 1980s, the absolute number of poor people in the region appears to be on the increase (ibid.). Poverty typically has a woman's face. Among the 1.3 billion poor people in the world, 70 percent are woman (ibid.). It is not surprising, therefore, that in Asia rural women make up the most deprived and neglected sector of the population. Rural women, like Sebrina and Aida, suffer from low literacy, lack of mobility, limited time for formal schooling and limited access to social services, in addition to drudgery and the overburdening of tasks. Their potential for development has not been duly recognised.
It is now accepted that educating girls and women is one of the proven pathways to social and economic development (UNFPA, State of the World Population Report 1996). Education has also been shown to cause a reduction in fertility rates from 5 to 10 percent (ibid.). At the same time, female education has been found to improve the status of women, as well as family nutrition and domestic food production. Through education and job or skills training, women's empowerment can thus be achieved. Armed with the appropriate knowledge and skills needed to enable them to contribute to community and national development, women can be freed from their marginalised state. Education is therefore a precondition to achieve the genuine development of women.
| Box 1: Assessment of Radio as a Medium to Facilitate Mass Education |
| Radio provides the needed reach, frequency, and access to rural and remote areas, making it a promising, appropriate and powerful tool for education. In addition, ownership and patronage among poor households are relatively high compared to other media forms, particularly in rural settings. |
| A Dominant Medium: Radio reaches even far-flung and isolated areas. Radio ownership is higher than that of other media vehicles, therefore it is a mass-based media. Radio represents a “home” entertainment medium and penetrates areas with few televisions and low print readership. For instance, in the Philippines, radio is the most widespread form of media with 448 stations nationwide. |
| An Effective Medium: Radio is a high frequency vehicle which caters to both literate and illiterate populations. The impact of its auditory properties on the senses help to dramatise messages. Radio is flexible in shifting from one message/content to another. Both production and material costs are low. It can serve as a two-way form of communication in remote areas and provides a potential vehicle for grassroots action and mass education |
| A Cost-efficient Medium: Radio is a cost-efficient media form. For instance, in the Philippines, the cost of radio per thousand is just US$1.60 to US$3.10. By comparison, the costs of other media are high: television ($32.80); local print ($86.70); cinema ($53.80); and fliers ($38.50 per thousand). |
In this context, Dr. Jose Rizal, the great Filipino hero praised the desire of women in Malolos, Bulacan to educate themselves. In his view “the cause of the backwardness of Asia lies in the fact that there the women are ignorant, are slaves; while Europe and America are powerful because there the women are free and well educated… hence our desire to bring you the light that illuminates your equals here in Europe … may your desire to educate yourselves be crowned with success”.
Yet, high illiteracy rates and low levels of schooling among the majority of rural women in Asia continue to limit their ability to lift themselves out of poverty. Despite demands for increased education, the existing educational system in Asia is entirely unable to respond to this need which exists on such a massive scale. In particular, the formal school system in many poverty stricken Asian countries is incapable of coping with the massive education needs of the rural poor, most especially women. Consequently, women continue to be consistently denied access to information, knowledge, skills and technology transfer.
In order to empower women as equal partners in development, the limitations of the formal educational are now being challenged. Urgent and new ways to achieve mass education, that can be both efficient and effective, are being sought. In this context, radio, an effective telecommunications medium, has been proposed as one massive solution. Radio can cut across geographic and cultural boundaries. Given its availability, accessibility, cost-effectiveness and power, radio represents a practical and creative medium for facilitating mass education in the Asian rural setting. Box 1 presents a more detailed assessment of the suitability of radio for mass education. A comparison of the ownership of and accessibility of radio against different types of media in Asia is made in Annex 1.
Despite several separate initiatives to promote distance education via radio throughout the Asia-Pacific region, radio remains a largely unexplored response to mass education. In this context, this case study aims to present a model for community-based radio broadcasting, based on the successful experience of the BBC-DZJO on-the-air school in the Philippines. It is hoped that this model will serve as a practical guide to direct and assist those charged with planning and implementing distance education programmes for rural women and poor households in other countries.
In particular, the case study sets out some basic principles of community-based radio and proposes a framework for a community-based radio distance learning system. This conceptual framework includes a discussion of the four key elements of a community-based radio distance learning system, that is context, content, format and process. It also provides a seven point check-list to strengthen curriculum design for community-based radio learning.
This report seeks to illustrate the potential of mass media, and in particular radio, to reach rural populations largely untouched by formal education programmes. It discusses the benefits of using radio as a medium to reach the poor, as compared to other types of media. It also compares the potential of radio school to other educational programmes such as classroom teaching or farmer field schools etc. Radio is not advocated as a substitute for more formal types of education. Rather, the report seeks to demonstrate how, in situations characterised by high illiteracy and limited resources, radio has the potential to reach the greatest number of rural households in the most cost-efficient and time-efficient manner, thereby achieving a critical mass in terms of impact.
