The media panorama in Venezuela, as in the rest of Latin America, is facing major new challenges. The media reality in the Andean Region and in Latin America is in general similar. Most radio and television frequencies and the main newspapers are owned by a very few private companies. At the same time, Venezuela faces the challenge of taking responsibility for making the new information technologies (ICTs) available to all and to conveying knowledge properly to the most vulnerable, isolated population groups.

As community media arise, the problem that crops up is to train their journalists or communicators. Most community radio stations on the continent belong to organizations and societal, rural or indigenous movements, which do not have personnel sufficiently trained in communication.

The Guásimos Community Foundation proposes to offer practical, theoretical and technical training for community communicators (male and female) from the least-favored zones (rural, indigenous and student sectors in the States of: Táchira, Mérida, Trujillo, Barinas, Zulia and Bolívar) as well as access to the media; and encourage the participatory creation of diverse cultural, educational, historical and informational contents in the area of communication to build capacities for collective, broad, democratic thinking.

The project’s purpose is to fill the above-mentioned communicational gaps by training 120 community communicators, providing them with theoretical and technical knowledge about producing radio clips with educational and cultural contents. The training will not only focus on the transmission of technical knowledge; instead, the two-way learning approach will enable communicators to contribute their own knowledge about the specific realities that they are experiencing in their daily lives. This process will also be enriched by other training experiences in the region.