From 1981 to 1997, Stella Hughes worked as a broadcast journalist for Radio France International and, as a consultant, was involved with the establishment of the first community radio stations in Soweto and other townships in South Africa. She was also Paris correspondent for several years for New Scientist magazine and the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Stella Hughes joined the cabinet of the Director-General of UNESCO in 1997 and recently moved to the Communication Division as co-ordinator of the new programme for integration new and traditional information and communication technologies.
The new UNESCO programme for community multimedia centres addresses the digital divide in some of the poorest communities of the developing world.
The community multimedia centre offers a gateway to active membership of the global knowledge society. By combining local radio (or television) by local people in local languages with information and communication technology (ICT) applications in a wide range of social, economic and cultural areas, it ensures that the ICTs are genuinely enabling technologies for all members of the community.
At its most basic, the centre offers the simplest portable radio station, plus a single computer for Internet browsing, e-mail and basic office, library and learning applications.
At its most developed, the centre is a major infrastructure, offering a full range of multimedia facilities, linking up to the local hospital for telemedicine applications and so forth.
In countries where broadcasting laws do not yet permit community radio to go on air, initiatives such as Internet radio and cassette radio can provide an alternative. In villages without electricity or telephones, where Internet cannot be accessed, solar energy and satellite link-up can enable the delivery of multimedia data.
This programme comes within the framework of the Global Knowledge Partnership Action Plan, for which UNESCO was asked to take the "champion" role for Action Item 1.3.
The GKP approach emphasises coalitions for development and this programme encourages public authorities and the international community to harness their efforts to bridge the digital divide at community level through solidarity and cooperation which supports:
In the era of the knowledge society and the knowledge economy, access to the infrastructure to share information and knowledge is paramount for social and economic development. It is evident that the traditional forms of knowledge acquisition are insufficient to foster an inclusive knowledge society. People and communities in the developing world need access to the mechanisms that provide multiple sources of rapid information - and information exchange - which traditional ways of accumulating and exchanging knowledge cannot deliver. The Internet and associated technologies are pivotal to the new means of knowledge acquisition. However, disparities of access, language barriers, low literacy levels, the cost of the technologies and of connectivity are creating a growing digital divide which hampers vital access to new knowledge resources for many in the developing countries. As a result, the knowledge revolution is actually resulting in relative knowledge poverty for most of the world's population.
Efforts to eradicate poverty through development that is endogenous, bottom-up and community-driven are increasingly hinging on the harnessing of information and communication, now seen by many as the "missing link" in the development process. In other words, information and communication are no longer seen as the prerogative of national governments and international development experts, but as the basic tools of the poor in their own efforts to improve their lives. Participants at the Global Knowledge Partnership Action Summit in Kuala Lumpur in March 2000 argued forcefully that the people of the most marginalised communities in the developing world must become recognised actors in the process of developing knowledge. This echoes the findings of many baseline studies on people's needs: members of the poorest communities often identify the deficit in communication and information as one of their most acute problems.
At the same time as this new paradigm is emerging at community level, global efforts to address the digital divide, notably through the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) and the G-8 DOT Force Initiative, are leading to the development of strategies at the international and national levels. It is essential that the bottom-up effort at community level should link to, complement and be reinforced by national policies. This is because the appropriation of knowledge through information and communication is a human development issue and while it needs support from the top, it is not a technical or material resource issue that can be handled at the top. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are not a solution or a goal in themselves: they offer the means for communities to identify and implement their own solutions leading to their own goals in the field of human, social, cultural and economic development. It is therefore essential to expand the concept of access from the right to receive information to include the notion of greater access to the means of content production. Governments and development partners can and should be supportive of this process, but the driving force is to be found within communities themselves.
The reason for this focus on the integration of technologies is a straightforward one: only when the Internet and other "new" ICTs are combined with "traditional" community radio, can all members of a community - irrespective of languages spoken or level of learning - be fully included in the process of accessing, identifying, producing and exchanging information relevant to their needs. Radio is far from being solely a vehicle for reaching out to audiences with information gathered from the Internet: it is also a vehicle for creating contents, for gathering and shaping information which can then be disseminated through new technologies. The individual user model of access to ICTs in Western consumer societies is clearly inadequate for poor communities in the developing world. Even collective community ownership, management and use of these technologies are costly. Their integration with radio enables this relatively high investment to reap maximum returns by reaching the entire community and not only those who would make individual use of ICTs. This puts a different perspective on the problematic issues of sustainability and public subsidy.
The Community Multimedia Centre offers ordinary people a gateway to the global knowledge society. It combines local radio (or television) by local people in local languages with information and communication technology (ICT) applications in a wide range of social, economic and cultural areas. This ensures that the ICTs are genuinely enabling technologies for all members of the community. At its most basic, the centre offers the simplest portable radio station, plus a single computer for Internet browsing, e-mail and basic office, library and learning applications. At its most developed, the centre is a major infrastructure, offering a full range of multimedia facilities, linking up to the local hospital for telemedicine applications, down-loading and printing national newspapers for local circulation and so forth. In countries where broadcasting laws do not yet permit community radio to go on air, initiatives such as Internet radio and cassette radio can provide an alternative. In villages without electricity or telephones, where Internet cannot be accessed directly, solar energy and satellite technology can enable the delivery of multimedia information and distance learning material and can offer low-cost asynchronous data exchange via e-mail. Given the importance of long-term economic sustainability, solar or other forms of renewable energy should be used whenever possible, to reduce recurrent costs.
It is clear from the above that centres can vary greatly, both in scale and in nature, according to local circumstances. However, in all cases, the Community Multimedia Centre pre-supposes that ICTs will be oriented towards collective community use, while also being available for individual access. But in addition, in the interest of sustainability and range of services, a community multimedia centre may offer a combination of public and privately run facilities, with services such as telephone, fax and e-mail possibly offered on a commercial basis alongside not-for-profit access to other facilities. The creation of the infrastructure is only a first step. The key to the success of these centres is their ability to collect, interpret, produce, exchange and disseminate relevant contents for the development needs of individuals, target groups such as women and young people and for the community as a whole.
UNESCO is proposing to initiate and champion an international programme to promote community empowerment through Community Multimedia Centres, in close cooperation with international partners, national authorities and local communities. This programme will be based on concerted efforts to:
The components of such a varied and complex programme should be developed progressively according to the needs of the particular communities. However, two essential elements, outlined below, are the integration of community broadcasting (most commonly, radio) in multimedia centres and the systematic involvement of women, minorities and excluded populations at every stage.
Community radio is low-cost, easy to operate reaches all segments of the community through local languages and can offer information, education, entertainment, as well as a platform for debate and cultural expression. As a grass-roots channel of communication, it maximises the potential for development to be drawn from sharing the information, knowledge and skills already existing within the community. It can therefore act as a catalyst for community and individual empowerment. However, community radio usually operates in a self-contained world within a very limited broadcast radius. To access and exchange information with the rest of the world, links via telephone, Internet, e-mail, fax, satellite, television and newspapers are required.
By itself, a Multipurpose Community Telecentre (MCT) overcomes the technological barriers to communication, access and exchange of information with the rest of the world. Through training schemes and the presence of facilitators, it can offer to a wide range of people, and not only the best educated, the possibility of using its resources individually or in small groups. Moreover, the use made of the MCT by certain members of the community - teachers, health workers, etc - can be of great benefit to whole segments of that community: their students, patients etc. However, an MCT cannot serve a mass public, measured in several thousand individuals in the context of community development programmes. Moreover, it can only overcome the obstacles of illiteracy or lack of knowledge of national or international languages through the introduction of specially designed software. To reach a mass public swiftly, in local languages and through the spoken word, the linkage of the MCT with community radio is essential.
Community radio and MCTs are clearly complementary and can function in parallel in the same community, offering a broad spectrum of distinct services. However, when their traditional and innovative technologies are actively combined, they can offer far greater possibilities for engaging a community in its own development. The possibilities generated by the combination of the two are not confined to quantity or range; the qualitative nature of those possibilities also changes. This is because of the particularly dynamic relationship between communication and information, between contact and content. The combination of a grass-root public platform with access to information highways promotes the public debate and public accountability that are essential for strengthening democracy and good governance. The combination of local radio with a community database developed by local people, building up a store of relevant data for educational, informational and developmental requirements, provides a solid knowledge base for the illiterate and the literate alike. This is a transfer of technology, which encourages rather than diminishes the cultural self-confidence of its users.
The specific "added value" which is offered by the community multimedia centre derives from the unbroken continuum it establishes between different types of information, between people with different levels of learning and between the different levels of contact both within a community and between that community and the rest of the world. The community multimedia centre, as an inclusive, "info-rich" force for development, not only meets identified learning and information needs, but also creates a new demand for learning, information and knowledge.
As ICTs increasingly impact on core social and economic activities, the fact that the poorest and most marginalised, including ethnic and linguistic minorities, are excluded from contributing to and benefiting from them becomes an ever-greater deprivation. Predominant among those currently excluded from the ICT revolution are women. This makes gender mainstreaming an essential component of every community multimedia project.
From the preliminary stages of project discussion and design, through the ensuing stages of implementation and evaluation, a gender perspective has to be built into plans, policy and practice. Community radio can be a remarkably effective gateway for women in disadvantaged communities to approach the new information technologies. The self-confidence and skills gained with low-tech radio offer a bridge for these women to the high-tech of ICTs. It is often the women who experience the greatest communication deficit prior to the introduction of community radio. Their motivation and sense of empowerment are, consequently, particularly high when they learn to use local broadcasting. The participatory approach of community radio (collective ownership, listening groups, etc) provides a supportive framework for women as they go on to tackle the challenges posed by the effective use of ICTs. This participatory approach maximises the literacy and language skills available within the group, needed even more for computer use than for radio. These skills can be pooled to select, translate and disseminate information throughout the entire group, so that even the illiterate women within the group are fully involved in defining information needs, benefiting from information gathered, interpreting and imparting information to others.
The necessary steps taking women, minorities and other marginalised groups from community radio to the computer screen are likely to include the following:
Stella Hughes
UNESCO
