Indigenous Radio

Hi Guys,

I like where this is going and we did talk about the importance of community radio and local communications at the eBario event. Like most telecommunications, the successful examples of community and indigenous radio are in the developed countries and areas like Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, and the United States.

In the lesser developed countries the main obstacles for implementing local radio are:
infrastructure - limited or no infrastructure like electricity, phones etc.
state control - a lot of countries have state control over communications and don't hand out licenses for community radio or indigenous radio
education - little or no education on what community radio can do and how to implement it

Bario did not have a local radio station and one of the suggestions at the end of the workshop was to help develop a local community radio station. Jim Remedia from CAAMA http://www.caama.com.au/caama/ in Australia came up with the idea and wanted to support it. His organization operates Australia's national indigenous radio network. He would be a good one to call and get involved in this conversation.

Another person is Teanau Tuiono from New Zealand. Teanau works with the Indigenous ICT Taskforce. At the workshop we talked about getting community radio stations online in various capacities. After the workshop Teanau did up a draft proposal for a project that highlights how we can help indigenous community radio stations in various capacities. He did mention some people working with community radio stations who would be interested in doing this project from Africa, and South America.

The ideas in the proposal attached is a lot like what Fernando is talking in his last post.

Brian already invited Teanau into this conversation and I will see if Jim Remedia would like to participate.

Jesse