The liberalization of the audiovisual space in 1990 witnessed an upsurge of private radios, television stations and newspapers across the national territory. Cameroon today boasts of over 300 newspapers, more than 200 private radio stations and over 50 private television channels. This dramatic growth of private ownership of media space has been supported by a modest growth in training institutions, most of which offer middle level journalism training.

This modest growth in the area of journalism training has created a vacuum in radio and television stations that require personnel to produce and run programs. This has resulted in the hiring of self-trained journalists or quacks whose capacity for programming is very limited and production non-existent. The result is that media programs are of low quality and hardly address issues of vital interest to their primary audience. This situation is even more critical in community radio stations that rely mainly on volunteers to produce and run programs. Otherwise, it would be interesting to know why community radios are not as performant as they were expected to be at the time of their creation. Possible constraints could be the legal framework supporting the community radio, funding, ownership, location and programming.

This project seeks to align these constraints against the performance of community radios in an attempt to develop a more functional and conducive framework within which community radios can adequately perform the role for which they were created. In order to do this, the project needs funding to conduct in depth assessment of community radios across the national territory. The study will be followed by a training workshop bringing together representatives of the community radios to work on the problematic of community radio performance based on the findings of the study. Solutions and recommendations will be replicated to all community radios across Cameroon.