At 3:53 PM +0000 08/07/2002, Lynette Obare wrote: > We need to be very cautious about how they get to be used in community > and ensure that it does not marginalise women or those with low income. > We also needs to consider women's gender daily calender and when to air > certain programmes so that it coincides with the time they are at home. > Without taking some of these intricate issues into consideration we risk > losing an important target audience. > > Having been part of the Kenya Community Media Network that promotes > different approaches in community empowerment, use of community radio as > a tool has been hindered by licensing of airwaves. It also involves a > lot of resources. We were also looking into the use of manual radios but > we realised that these also required resources.
We have been trying to excite interest in very low-cost rural oriented community radio initiatives. We have found that it is possible to get fairly good reach in a small region (dia less than 1/2 km, about the size of a typical village) using extremely low powered radio frequency modulators feeding ordinary paired wire. This leaks enough power to ensure that receivers in the vicinity of the wire can get decent reception. Since leakage of power is intrinsic to any electric wire, we maintain no explicit licensing is needed. In fact, if there is already a local cable TV network in place, this can be used to carry the signals. We use very low cost digital recording equipment to build the production studio, thus the total cost of operation is also low. The remaining cost is in the training of the people who will produce audio content on a regular basis. We have successfully set up this kind of community radio in India. Please contact me off-list if you would like to have more details. -- Vickram Crishna ceo Net Radiophony India Pvt Ltd Wireless Freedom! www.radiophony.com "how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?" -- R. Buckminster Fuller ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
