La Ond@ Rural - Workshop on Radio, New ICTs and Rural Development
Quito, Ecuador, 20-23 April 2004
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, in cooperation with the Asociación Latinoamericana de Educación Radiofónica (ALER - Latin American Association for Radio Education)the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters(AMARC)and UNESCO, is
organising a Latin American regional workshop
on radio, new information and communication technologies(ICT), food security and rural development.
The workshop will consider a series of proposals for promoting the effective use of ICT and rural radio for rural development. The proposals, prepared in advance by expert teams, will be directed towards broadcasters and ICT for development practitioners, their national and regional networks, policy makers, and donors.
The results will be presented to the biannual ministerial conference of the FAO's Latin American region and published and disseminated both on the web and as a book.
Objectives
- To develop strategies for the effective combination of new ICTs and rural radio to support food security and rural development and to prepare the groundwork for their implementation;
- To devise strategies for promoting collaborative networking among rural radio broadcasters, for ensuring that their interests are incorporated in the activities of existing national and regional rural radio networks, and for linking rural broadcasters with ICT for development networks;
- To evaluate approaches for improving rural people's access to information related to development, including but not limited to food security and agriculture, using both traditional and new information and communication technologies;
- To build and strengthen linkages between rural radio broadcasters and sources of information related to rural development, including the FAO's World Agricultural Information Centre (WAICENT);
- To develop proposals for public policies that will improve rural communication and create an enabling environment for the 'convergence' of radio and new ICTs;
- To identify country-level and regional projects that respond to the most pressing needs and that employ common strategies that enable the effective use of technical cooperation.
Themes
Content - management, production, selection and sharing: Rural development requires specialised content and ICTs can provide access to overwhelming quantities of it. How can local broadcasters deal with this situation? What mechanisms can be established to link local information needs with the information available on the internet? What formats are most appropriate?
Training: This area will seek to: (1) assess the training needs of rural radio stations wishing to make full use of ICTs and (2) consider how ICTs can be used to support training activities through the use of, for example, distance learning modules.
Rural communication policy and practices: This will include examining the policies and practices of public institutions responsible for communication and rural development. How can they contribute to the creation of an enabling environment for the new forms of rural communication made possible by the use new ICTs in conjunction with radio.
Participants
There will be sixty workshop participants of which half will be rural communicators, including broadcasters and ICT/multimedia practitioners. The rest will come from national and regional networks, from government, from FAO projects and offices in the region, and from key institutions active in the field.
Preparatory Process
The workshop will be the culmination of a process that has already begun with the structuring of four Working Groups, one on each theme. The working groups will be small, with a chairperson and two or three members. Each Working Group will be charged with producing a paper (written by the Chair or another member of the group) outlining the thematic area and developing a series of proposals for the consideration of the workshop participants. These will include: proposals for immediate actions that can be undertaken by individual stations and networks to improve their practices; proposals for longer-term collaborative activities to be undertaken by existing networks; and proposals for country-level and regional projects that respond to the most pressing needs and that employ common strategies that enable the effective use of technical cooperation.
Agenda
The workshop will take place over a three-day period, from April 20 to 22, 2004. A drafting group will continue work over the weekend of April 24 and 25. A final presentation of the workshop results will be made to the FAO Latin American and Caribbean Regional Conference during the week of April 26 to 30.
The Project Partners' Experience with Radio and New ICTs
An organising committee has been set up for the event with the participation of the partner institutions, FAO, ALER, AMARC and UNESCO, four organisations with experience working with radio and new ICTs. FAO is the lead organisation.
The FAO's history of working with rural radio dates back to 1966 when, together with UNESCO, it organised a series of meetings that sparked the creation of radio listening clubs and rural radio stations in Africa. Since then the FAO has provided direct assistance for setting up stations, developed training materials, and supported network building amongst rural broadcasters.
The radio/new ICT combination plays a central role in the FAO's efforts to bridge the rural digital divide by ensuring that ICTs are used to improve rural lives in developing countries. With a website dedicated to rural radio, FAO supports a growing global network of multimedia rural communicators. It is also publishing a book on radio and ICTs for development and democracy, The One to Watch: Radio, ICTs and Interactivity.
In February 2001 the FAO organised a similar workshop for African broadcasters, Information and Communication Technologies Servicing Rural Radio: New Contents, New Partnerships. As a result of that workshop the FAO and AMARC are now cooperating in a project to provide training and technical assistance to AMARC's Internet-based Simbani News Agency, which will begin offering its services to African radio stations in mid-2003. The agency's priority themes, include food security, human rights and democracy, gender and development, the environment, and HIV/AIDS.
AMARC's Latin American office has also been active in the area, particularly with the Agencia Informativa Púlsar, a radio news agency that AMARC helped set-up in 1996 and that it now operates out of Montevideo. Púlsar's news and information services are delivered to hundreds of subscriber stations. Púlsar also conducted national level training on radio and ICTs in most of Central and South America.
ALER has been a leader in combining radio with modern ICTs since 1997, when it established its satellite service, ALRED. Programming delivered via the satellite is produced in Spanish and Quechua. National correspondents send news over the Internet for satellite distribution by the main production centre in Ecuador. In addition to the satellite, ALER distributes a daily electronic news bulletin via email and the web.
UNESCO is heading an international initiative for Community Multimedia Centres (CMCs) that promote community empowerment and development by combining community radio by with community telecentre facilities. CMCs use a 'radio-browsing' technique in which broadcasters search the web in response to listeners' queries and discuss, on air, the contents of pre-selected websites with studio guests. Part of this initiative involves producing training material and both AMARC and the FAO are cooperating with this task.
The workshop also draws on the ICT for development experience of ICT for development networks such as Somos Telecentros and ITDG Peru (Intermediate Technology Development Group) and builds on an earlier initiative of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and Comunica, which co-organised a seminar on broadcasting and the Internet in Latin America in 2000.
