In addition to the above mentioned funding organisations, there are organisations involved in skills training for the stations, often referred to as ‘capacity-building’. These training organisations65 deal with many stations, both community broadcasters and non-community broadcasters. They have individual aims, but all operate under the rubric of ‘media development’.66
Organisations such as Internews Kenya and BBC Media Action are actively involved in training the staff in both commercial and community radio stations, in skills such as content generation. The Kenya Community Media Network (KCOMNET) has also been actively
65 The organisations I discuss here are not exhaustive of all that deal with Kenyan community media; rather, I focus on those that have dealt with some or all three of the stations studied.
66 Manyozo (2014) summarizes this approach as a focus on modernizing media systems and infrastructure, training media workers, and lobbying for enabling policies which can strengthen good governance.
involved in capacity building specifically among community radio stations, via a grant from UNESCO. These organisations term their engagement with community radio stations as
‘partnership’, but seem to come with preconceived recommendations on what sort of content community radio should produce, based on their view of what role such stations should play in society. I address BBC Media Action, Internews Kenya, and KCOMNET briefly in this section.
4.9.1 Democracy, Governance and Health: Internews Kenya and BBC Media Action
BBC Media Action and Internews are two international organisations involved in training not only community radio stations, but a variety of media stations in Kenya. They work in the focus areas of technical skills enhancement, which is referred to as ‘capacity-building’, and training on democracy and governance.
Internews Kenya, an international non-profit media development organisation, focuses on enhancing the capacity of journalists through training them in on-air presentation skills, production skills, and business plan design for the station in order to ensure sustainability. The organisation is also engaged in strengthening journalists’ data mining skills, such that they can make use of government websites, for instance, to get background information for their stories.
It aims to enhance the ability of local media to provide news and information, as well as be a forum where people’s voices are heard. In Kenya, the organisation runs health, democracy and governance projects.67
BBC Media Action is BBC’s international development charity. It focuses on training journalists to address democracy and governance issues, and to create radio programmes around water, hygiene and sanitation-related issues. It works on the premise that media and communication have the power to reduce poverty and aid people in understanding their rights.
In its programmes with several stations in Kenya, including Koch FM, BBC Media Action’s stated goal is “to inspire young people to make informed choices and help them hold those in power to account.”68
67 See http://www.internewskenya.org/home/
68 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/where-we-work/africa/kenya/bbc-sema
These two organisations, working globally, share similar focus areas: democracy, governance and health. The first two especially (democracy and governance) came to the fore in the 1990s in the post-cold war neoliberal turn, with global funding institutions such as the World Bank adopting it as a way to ensure development results in the Global South.69 Since the 1990s, media has been linked to the cultivation of democracy and good governance, especially in the Global South.70 The work of these two organisations in the Kenyan community media sector to promote these principles points once more to a global rhetoric regarding the priorities that local media should be pursuing. These focus areas are evident in the mission statements of the stations studied, especially Koch FM. However, as will be discussed later in this chapter, their day to day achievement is always under negotiation based on the contexts in which the stations exist, and the funding arrangements at the stations.
4.9.2 Reaching Community Radio’s Canaan of the Five Pillars: KCOMNET
In a UNESCO-funded training project conducted with community radio stations in 2013 and 2014 for the purpose of ‘Strengthening Community Radio Identity and Content’71, Kenya Community Media Network (KCOMNET)’s stated objectives included working to enhance
‘understanding on community radio concept, identity, principles and ethics by community radio practitioners’.72 The training materials drew heavily from Communication for Development (C4D) literature, which states that community radio has a major role to play in the ‘development and social progress of the community’.73 Through this project, KCOMNET attempted to get community radio broadcasters to operate from one shared conceptual stance.
As elaborated by the KCOMNET coordinator on how KCOMNET works with community broadcasters,
69 According to Mkandawire (2007), good governance as a value was initially proposed by African intellectuals to refer to establishment of state-society relations that are developmental, democratic and respectful of citizens' rights, and socially inclusive. This was in reports to World Bank in 1989. However, the term was appropriated by the bank and linked to economic policy and Structural Adjustment Programmes (which had actually been previously found not to work). It was narrowed down to refer to technocratic transparency and accountability rather than its originally broader meaning which the Africans had envisioned. It became an administrative tool.
70 See for example Chakravartty, 2007; Fraser & Restrepo-Estrada, 2002; Milligan & Mytton, 2009; Mudhai, 2011; Pettit, Salazar, & Dagron, 2009
71 See http://www.kcomnet.org/projects/2014/12/4/strengthening-community-radio-identity-and-content
72 For the reports detailing the project outcomes, see
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53174cebe4b01396b75616d5/t/552d1b58e4b0c4575fde0c25/1429019480 444/KCOMNET-HIVOS-KMP+2013%2C2014+Narrative+report+web+version.pdf
73 See p. 8 of the “Status of Content and programming by Community Radio Stations in Kenya” report on https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/fullscreen/31453155/status-of-content-and-programming-by-community-radio-stations-in-kenya
We find [the stations] might not really be able to achieve the ideal of all those qualities, the five points [community participation, non-profit model, community service, community ownership, and independence], but we find they are on the road to achieving all the principles. And we don’t lose hope that they’ve got only say two principles. We keep with them until we find that we are going to Canaan with them….the Canaan of the five principles. And it’s difficult, it’s like the constitution, you will not be able to achieve all of them, but you will aspire to achieve them. (Githethwa 2014)
There is a clear, externally-imposed vision of what community broadcasters should be, which KCOMNET strives to achieve through its engagement with the stations. As opposed to a bottom-up approach that would allow community radio stations to shape themselves as they wish in order to meet community priorities, there is an active intervention by KCOMNET to
‘standardize’ these stations in terms of the objectives that they should prioritize and the principles they should follow. Another of KCOMNET’s training goals for this project is
“institutional strengthening for KCOMNET to be able to guide the development and sustainability of community media sector in Kenya”74 (Italics mine). KCOMNET therefore positions itself as a facilitator of the growth of the Kenyan community media sector, acting as a mediator between global standards and local practice.
However, the negotiation between global and local expectations is not without its challenges for community broadcasters. For example, KCOMNET translates the ‘community service’
aspect of community broadcasting as airing development-related information relevant to the community. In one of the training workshops on community radio content in 201475, this aspect was emphasized as the ideal that community broadcasters should aspire to. While all the community broadcasters present verbally agreed on the importance of airing development-related information, they pointed out that it is not straightforward to implement especially in view of costs and competition.
In the Kenyan broadcast scene, as outlined in the first chapter, community radio stations are faced with competition from commercial stations which air in their broadcast areas. These commercial stations give priority to entertainment programming – mostly music and talk shows interspersed with advertisements - which is cheapest to produce and attracts high numbers.
Community media are, in contrast, as noted during the KCOMNET training, expected to focus on airing development-oriented content. However, this is a challenge because it is both more
74 See http://www.kcomnet.org/projects/2014/12/4/strengthening-community-radio-identity-and-content
75 Personally attended by the researcher
expensive to produce such content than to run non-stop music, and development content seems to attract lower listenership numbers. This concern was highlighted when an intern at one of the stations asked the trainer: ‘who will listen to us if we air such content?’76, and went on to describe her personal preferences for radio listening as being ‘to relax’ rather than to hear
‘serious content’. Indeed, community broadcasters seem to hold this opinion about their listeners’ preferences, because much as they air some development-related and community-specific content, they mostly rely on music to fill in much of their air time. They feel that this puts them in a stronger position to attract listenership, in view of the commercial stations already airing in their broadcast areas. The intern’s question highlighted the survival concerns which community broadcasters always have to keep in mind even as they seek to meet the ideal community broadcasting aims.77 It also highlights the fact that community broadcasters seek to compete with commercial stations, rather than fill a unique niche that commercial stations do not fill.
As discussed in this section, similar to NCA which seeks to prepare Koch FM for engagement with bigger international donors, KCOMNET, drawing on global rhetoric, aims to influence community broadcasters’ ideas of what niche they should be filling in their communities. This effort to provide external orientation about what a community broadcaster’s priorities should be illustrates the position of community broadcasters as the local link in an international chain of actors, where they are expected to play certain roles and not others.
Training community broadcasters on global community media principles, while useful in bringing local community broadcasters up to date with global discourses about community radio, runs the risk of devaluing the broadcasters’ emic voice. Accurately or not, this approach implies that community broadcasters are not aware of why they are existent in the first place.
It may build the technical capacity of the broadcaster, but does not take into account their agency and ability to assess their own priorities. It discourages the possibility that a station could work based on different priorities which are equally valid and relevant to the community, but are not part of the global discourse at all. In part due to reliance on international funding sources, community stations are constrained to engage with this global rhetoric and align their
76 From field notes 26.03.2014
77 Listenership patterns, radio content at these stations and the considerations that go into producing it are further discussed in Chapter 5 on listenership trends, Chapter 6 on community radio content, and Chapter 7 on producers and their daily work routines.
priorities accordingly. Thus, the tension between whether to cater purely to local and national concerns or to accommodate global recommendations is always under negotiation.