Strengthening community communication
There are more than ten thousand low-power radios in Brazil, most of them community radios. The applicable law on community radios, 9.612/98, imposes many limitations on their activities, including preventing community radio stations from broadcasting advertisements or belonging to a network, thus constraining their potential. Community radio stations throughout Brazil exist despite the lack of training policies or subsidies for improved development of communication activities, leading to problems in sustainability and a tendency to copy commercial models of communication.
This project intends to strengthen five radio stations in the region of the Transamazonic highway, in the North of Brazil; and five radio stations in the region of Sisal, in the Northeast of Brazil, in order to make them more articulated and able reflect on their actions. Community projects that arise from the necessity of local people tend to struggle to survive due to a lack of future planning, and lack of skilled staff, and also due to local or regional problems. These factors contribute to a decrease in the number of radio programmes/stations in existence, thus having a negative impact on the plurality of the media. This project will promote self-reflection practices within the population, facilitating the existence of these spaces. These practices include individual processes with each radio station, and collective processes between stations of the same region. It is also intended to look at gender inequalities and focus the reflections on women (50% of the trainees will be women). The stations that will take part in the individual processes may help other broadcasters to experience similar practices at the end of the project, thus multiplying the capacity of training and performance of the other 20 radios in the region. The Management and Training Team can consequently apply and multiply this experience in other parts of the country.