Reaching thousands, throughout the Jumla area in Nepal
Friday, 24 November 2006
JUMLA, NEPAL. "Concern's objective is to work with the poorest people," says Ann O'Mahony, regional director for Concern Worldwide.
"Therefore in an assessment of Nepal, they saw that some of the poorest areas in Nepal were here in the Jumla area, so that's why this became our target."
O'Mahony is speaking from the basement of a stone house on the outskirts of this remote mountain town.
It is a place with no paved roads, no land connections to the outside world - a place so remote all work is by animal or human muscle; all transport by foot or cart.
And yet, her words will soon be heard by almost all the 77,000 people who live in this region, thanks to Radio Karnali, an innovative programme run by one of Concern's local partners.
"We find that the radio is essential to our work here," says Kushendra Mahat, executive director of Kirdarc, the community group that founded the radio station, and Concern's partner in Jumla.
"It's essential to get information out there - lack of information causes poverty. With the radio we can reach 77,000 people at once despite the transportation difficulties here."
Radio Karnali broadcasts for six hours each day - lack of steady electrical power limits the schedule. It's a mix of music, entertainment, news and education programmes.
For three hours each morning and three hours each evening, its high-energy mix of Nepali music and talk can be heard down every street in town as the locals tune in.
"It's a very innovative programme to bring messages to 77,000 people in the Jumla area," says Linda Burns, country director for Concern Nepal.
"The area is extremely isolated and there are no roads, so this is a huge medium where people can get information where they didn’t get information before.
We're supporting them in the area of water and sanitation so they're giving water and sanitation messages to the community in very, very rural areas."
Concern funds a weekly health programme on the station that uses local people to pass on messages such has proper food preparation techniques, the importance of personal hygiene and hand-washing - the sorts of small bits of knowledge that Concern has found can make a big difference in family health in under-developed areas like rural Nepal.
At 6:30, the mud-and-stone streets of Jumla are still empty, but mixed in with the sounds of families starting their day is Radio Karnali.
One of the station's cultural programme hosts is reading poetry into the microphone, a reedy sing-song reciting the verses.
In the control room, the technical director monitors the broadcast while the morning news team writes up its notes.
A quick procession of hosts - men and women, young and old – passes through the two-room operation.
A small mixing board, CD player, cassette tape deck and single personal computer are all the equipment needed to create the only mass media to serve this region.
There are no professional broadcasters here - everyone is from the community, locally trained and locally focused.
"This area is very isolated from Khatmandu and the experts there," Mahat says.
"We thought we could train our own journalists to bring out the community issues, so we held workshops throughout the area and now we have 45 people trained as community journalists."
That local focus is reflected in the programming mix, with its heavy emphasis on local people, places and happenings.
Programme ideas and content come from the communities - a steady stream of listener feedback is one of the benefits of working at a radio station run by a community organizing group like Mahat's Kirdarc.
"Because we do all of our work through the community, we know what people want," Mahat says. "This is purely community radio."
