The Drum Beat 141 - DTR Radio Listening Clubs in Zambia

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This issue has been summarised or quoted from the report "Panos Southern Africa - DTR Radio Listening Clubs, Zambia: Impact Evaluation Report" released in Oct 2001. Links to further information are included below. To download a PDF document of the full report, click here.

Panos supports DTR (Development Through Radio) projects in Zambia, Malawi and Natal. The Zambia clubs were linked to the pilot DTR project in Zimbabwe launched by The Federation of African Media Women (FAMW) from their inception. FAMW assisted with the initial training for the Zambia clubs and there has been continued exchange between the groups.

THE PROJECT

1. This project ran from Nov 1998 to May 2001, involving 13 rural women’s clubs in the Mpika district of Zambia, 600 km north of Lusaka. The clubs recorded their discussions of development issues or requests for development support; the tapes were sent to a radio producer in Lusaka, who recorded a response from a relevant service-provider or politician. The discussion and response were edited into one programme and broadcast as a regular weekly programme by the national broadcaster, ZNBC. The clubs listened to the programmes and discussed them at their weekly meetings.

2. The evaluation assessed the development impact of the project, principally through group discussions and interviews with members of the clubs and others in their communities. An audience survey was also carried out, in 3 different areas.

3. Panos Southern Africa identified a set of 25 indicators with which to measure progress in reaching the DTR Radio Listening Clubs four Objectives:

• Enable clubs to bring development to themselves and their communities
• Empowerment of women
• Get voices of rural women heard and influential in national development discourse
• Stimulate debate

Objective 1: Enable clubs to bring development to themselves and their communities.

4. The clubs have succeeded in bringing considerable development finance and assistance to their communities, though their requests for support for the clubs' own income-generating activities have not so far been successful. The flow of material benefits received, and evident readiness of the communities to respond to discussions of social issues, has raised the status of the clubs and the project in the community...

5. Sharing of information, from outside respondents and from the clubs themselves, is generally seen as one of the principal benefits of the programmes, both by the clubs and by members of the communities. A farmer explained the value of a method of learning which "brings understanding from the base, rather than somebody coming with an idea which may sound alien."

6. A programme on Family Planning by Mununga club...helped improve people’s receptivity to the information on child spacing that was already available: "When the health workers were going round the villages trying to educate people, a lot of people were not interested, they didn’t think it was important, but when it started coming from their fellow women, from the clubs, a lot of people now have got interested and have started following."

7. Some community members attribute to the project an increased awareness of the value of information and education in general: "Children never used to be keen about going to school, but of late, because of what the parents talked about on radio they feel very encouraged and each one of them wants to go to school."

8. They have also stimulated new community actions. One community established a voluntary school for orphans in response to a radio programme about the problem of AIDS orphans who can’t pay school fees.

9. Overall, the DTR project seems to have stimulated a recognition, in the clubs themselves and widely in the communities, of the valuable role women can play as educators. The clubs see their role not just as a channel for information from other sources, but as a vehicle to pass on their own experience and to reflect on and propose solutions from within the community - a role that women no doubt played before, but which has been given more formality and status by the radio project.

10. Improvement in gender relations was mentioned...as one of the benefits of the project. "...men can now hear what’s going on in the clubs." ...One man observed, "Even in our homes, men are now saying that what the women are saying is what the men should also follow."

Objective 2: Empowerment of Women

11. "We have been empowered; we feel this very strongly. ...Gender balance has been a problem for a long long time. Since the project, women discuss such issues and try to bring about gender balance especially in the home." Many club members said their husbands were encouraging the clubs, starting within their own homes. The club members are proud of the fact that they are listened to all over the country, and that senior officials and politicians respond to their programmes on the radio: this confirms for them that the issues they discuss are important and universal.

12. "Women never used to discuss (political things) - such issues have arisen as a result of the radio programmes. This is very important and can change people’s attitude and even the way they live. Before, women didn’t even know that they had the right to speak about certain things and ask for correction when it was necessary, but with the introduction of the radio programmes women are able to speak about a lot of things. They didn’t know that it was the fundamental right of women to freely talk about issues..."

Objective 3: Getting the voice of rural women heard and influential in national development discourse

13. The audience survey carried out just before these evaluation meetings confirmed the popularity of the programme:

• Of a sample of 328 respondents, [in the 3 areas surveyed] 54% were aware of the existence of the women’s clubs, and 57% had heard some of the programmes. This included 45% of the people surveyed [in a town] several hundred kilometres from the project area, and 57% of the people surveyed in a district [with a different local language].
• Of these regular listeners, 64% could recall topics they had heard programmes discuss, and 59% said they had learned significant lessons from the programmes...

14. There is a clear feeling that voicing complaints through radio is much more effective than writing letters... One club chair said, "Everyone knows that everything has come from the radio, because in the past although you wrote a letter asking for something, [the authorities] were not considering it. Now they fail to hide it, because it was told openly, everyone was listening...so the one concerned has a problem thinking how he is going to answer."

Objective 4: Stimulate debate

15. "When we meet people from other villages...people always talk about the programme that was on - ‘Did you hear the programme? It was very interesting." ...Topics include agriculture, nutrition and balanced diets, gender equality, protection against HIV/AIDS, political rights and processes, the inheritance law, traditional customs, care of children, care of orphans, education and its cost.

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For more information on the DTR Listening Clubs in Zambia, contact Simon Mulumbi simon@panos.org.zm

For more information on the Evaluation, contact Kitty Warnock kitty.warnock@panos.org.uk

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