Communication by Communities for Communities By Patrick Kikine National Secretary, NCRF

1. Communication by Communities for Communities By Patrick Kikine National Secretary, NCRF

2. Community Radio mandate (Local Historic Context) • The Jabulani Freedom of the Airwaves conference in the Netherlands, August 1991, was instrumental in igniting a strong civil society sector involvement in the advocacy and lobby towards Democratic Broadcasting in South Africa. Key to the latter was the enactment of the IBA Act in 1993, creating a framework for the licensing of community sound broadcasters. • The Free the Airwaves campaign gave birth to the establishment of the National Community Radio Forum (NCRF) in 1993. NCRF was mandated by community media initiatives and civil society activist to spearhead the advocacy and lobby for a conducive environment for community broadcasters post 1993. The NCRF is a national, membership-driven association of community radio stations and initiatives and support service organizations. Radio station members are independent non-profit CBOs - owned and run by diverse local communities who actively participate in the development of programming activities, for sustainable non-discriminatory local development. • The NCRF facilitates the building of an enabling environment and a coherent sector identity -- ensuring continued healthy growth of community radio in South Africa.

3. Context Continue • South Africa is reeling under the onslaught of poverty as the gap between the rich and the seems to widen, communities retaliate through engaging increasingly in service delivery protests and the recent xenophobia attacks happened in poor communities where access to employment and livelihood is a daily struggle. • The picture painted above is not unique to South Africa and the symptoms differ from one country to another. We can sight numerous examples in our continent, Africa. • Political analysts have argued that the citizen disempowerment and inadequate communication lies at the root of citizen dissatisfaction with service delivery. Research conducted by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s (IDASA) Dialogue Unit in 2005 have revealed that frustrations with service delivery have been exacerbated by dysfunctional relationships between citizens and government • Community Media but more specifically Community Radio have a critical role to play within the communities it serves. This role cannot be achieved by stations alone, but in partnership with civil society. Networks or associations have a function to facilitate the latter role through advocacy and clear strategies.

4. A Definition for Development Communication • “Development Communications (DevCom) is the planned use of communication processes and media products to support effective policymaking, public participation and project implementation geared towards social, economic, political and ecological development. It is a two-way social inter action process enabling the people concerned to understand key factors and their interdependencies and to respond to problems in a competent way. • DevCom aims not so much at information dissemination as at a shared vision of a sustainable future and at capacity building in social groups to solve or prevent rising problems.”

5. Partnerships towards greater Social Impact • Community radio stations have furthermore been successful in serving communities through broadcasting dialogues on local development. Although the latter has not always been synchronised with the priority areas as highlighted in the Integrated Development Plans (ID Ps) of district and local municipalities, community radio has partnered civil society organisations in addressing socio-economic issues. • In South Africa, the sector has a clear development objective and section 34(4) of the Broadcasting Act (1999) prescribes a public-service mandate to be carried out by community broadcasting services, though relegated to community level. The sector is thus ideally placed to ensure civic education, democracy and social cohesion as well as to act as a vehicle to drive local economic development in communities. • The Role of NCRF is to facilitate the objective of these partnerships on a national level and also assist through providing leadership to the provincial NCRF structures & its 105 member stations.

6. Tool For Development Communication • Community Media is to be viewed as an aid to assist Municipalities and Civil Society Organisations to improve local communication strategies. The Role of NCRF within this area is to facilitate partnerships between Government and Civil Society stakeholders.

7. Regulatory Compliance • The regulator, ICASA places a high premium on Community Participation as a criterion in monitoring compliance of community broadcasters. In general community sound broadcasters form content partnerships with local CSO’s, but only in few instances does these happen as a result of a structured strategic program. There are best practice models within the sector such Riverside Fm and Bush Radio as stations and MTC and Workers World Media Productions (WWRP) as service providers. However at a local level stations employ different mechanisms in achieving the objective of Community Participation. The latter is not always enshrined in policy and hence the different interpretations and sometimes questionable effectiveness of some mechanisms. • The NCRF has developed a Pilot Community Participation framework and has tested the model at Jozi fm and West Coast fm with reasonable success. The model proposes that broadcasters identify specific sectors as guided by the licence conditions and local stakeholders. These sectors then form a community forum for the purposes of advising the Radio station Board on program ideas and projects. Where these structures already exists the station engage and endeavour to form a strategic partnership with similar objectives.

8. In Conclusion I want to Welcome again all delegates from all countries to Mzansi. I also hope that this will be a fruitful conference that will strengthen our unity as a sector and as a continent. www.ncrf.org.za