Community Radio faces many challenges, ranging from unfavourable legislative environments to weak governance and poor sustainability. The advent of community radio was motivated by the empowerment of poor and marginalized communities. Given the relevant role played by community radios in promoting human development, good governance, social justice, empowerment of women and human rights, it is important to promote stronger partnerships, collaboration and harmonization among them. AMARC Africa has identified as a key programme area in the development and capacity building of effective country networks. The AMARC Johannesburg Declaration provided a mandate to the organization to facilitate projects enabling a programme of action which ensures that the latter objective is met.
 
This project is aimed at initiating the process of strengthening Community Radio Networks through building a culture of good governance and self-regulation in Namibia. Following the Network’s workshop held by AMARC Africa in Johannesburg 2010, this project will provide AMARC with the ideal opportunity to develop a toolkit to support sustainable development of country networks. To date, there has never been a single, coherent documentation of the strengths of the most effective community radio networks, and there have been only limited efforts to help them to connect with each other and collaborate with those which are less effective, in order to share experiences, lessons, and advice for community radio network development.
 
Consequently, this proposal seeks to contribute to knowledge sharing and experience exchanges between community radio network representatives in a sustainable manner to increase the social impact of community radio in achieving development objectives. This proposal further seeks to organize an 8-month governance support programme to keep the momentum after the recent launch of the report on the status of community radio in Namibia. It also endeavours to ensure concrete actions are taken to implement the resolutions and workshop conclusions of the two-day session held concurrently with the launch of the latter report that anonymously agreed for the revival of the Namibian Community Radios’ Network (NCRN).