UNESCO Office in Windhoek 38-44 Stein Street, Klein Windhoek, P.O. Box 24519, Windhoek, Namibia
UNESCO hosts workshop for Namibia Community Radios
UNESCO Windhoek Office hosted a successful three day project evaluation workshop with four community radio stations in Namibia from 26 to 28 May 2015 at the John & Penny Ekamuti Town Lodge in Ondangwa. The focus of the workshop was on income generation and sustainability of local radios. The local stations funded by UNESCO within the framework of the three year Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) supported project are Base FM in Windhoek, Ohangwena Community Radio in Ohangwena, Live FM in Rehoboth, !Ah NBC Radio, and Namibian Community Broadcast Network.
The capacity building project aims to address local radios lack of quality programming, in particular scarcity of reporting on development issues and limited debate platforms for the poor. The workshop was facilitated by Thabang Pusoyabone who is the Station Manager at Radio Riverside a thriving local radio station based in Upington, South Africa. Pusoyabone was also a member of the National Community Radio Forum (NCRF) board in that country which is a lobbying and advocacy group that represents over 170 local radio stations.
The purpose of this workshop was to evaluate the work done by the stations as supported by UNESCO with specific focus on the following areas, the role of local communities in the sustainability of local radios, Good Governance for local radios – roles and responsibilities of board members and station management; importance of Annual General Meetings and harnessing ICTs to generate income for local radios. These themes were the guiding themes that qualified local stations to access support from this project and the evaluation was done to check how successful the stations were in these areas of work and what the challenges are that needed mitigation as the phase out stage of the project is to start from July 2015 to June 2016.
Local radio stations are in most cases faced with huge financial challenges and cripples ability of these stations to be sustainable not only financially, but also socially and institutionally. The three-legged approach to sustainability was encouraged during the workshop as a good method to adopt and lead to the growth of the sector in Namibia. The participants who attended this learning and sharing workshop said that it is important for station management and boards as leaders of the local stations to work together in ensuring that the founding vision and missions of stations are kept alive and that as many stakeholders should be made partners in the development of local radios in Namibia.
