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Why Combine Community Radio and Telecentre?
- 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 powerful agent for community and individual empowerment. However, community radio usually operates within a very limited broadcast radius and may have difficulty in accessing information. To access and exchange information, links via telephone, Internet, e-mail, fax, satellite, television and newspapers are required.
- A community telecentre overcomes the technological barriers to access and exchange of information. Through training schemes and the presence of facilitators in the centre, it can offer to a wide range of people, and not only the best-educated, the possibility of using its computers and other 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, a telecentre cannot reach a mass public, measured in several hundreds or thousands of individuals. 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 telecentre with community radio is essential.
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