Media Empowerment Programme

This programme works to develop the capacity of local organisations to use ICTs to produce creative community-basedmedia and educational broadcasting in an effort to reduce the digital divide while contributing to the MDGs and Education for All targets. In all its work, COL strives to develop media models that stress local participation and transfer of local knowledge and skills that may lead to sustainable employment for rural people living in poverty.

One key strategy involves drawing on global partnership to facilitate local ICT initiatives. Specifically, COL works with World Health Organization (WHO) country offices to identify key players - mainly in-country non-governmental organisations (NGOs) - who are focused on the health concerns of disadvantaged groups. COL provides these NGOs with digital audio and video production technology and training in an effort to empower them to share health-related and other content that is appropriate to the linguistic and cultural context and that draws on visual and oral communication to overcome the barriers of illiteracy. Radio, television, and village cinema events (where a generator powers a projector that shows DVDs that the NGO has created) are designed to reach far more people than a live performance of the NGO's skits or dramas would.

To cite one specific example of this approach, COL worked with staff of the Nova Scotia Gambia Association (NSGA), an NGO based in Canada and The Gambia, in an effort to reduce the stigma of HIV/AIDS and educate people about how to prevent transmission of the disease. NSGA's strategy had involved peer education in the form of skits and discussions about HIV/AIDS issues presented primarily to Gambian school groups; COL provided technology and training to enable NSGA to record these performances on video, thereby expanding the audience it could reach through village cinema events. The Gambian peer health education project was then replicated in Sierra Leone, where similar peer health training on video is being supplemented by the involvement of professional footballers to educate truck drivers about HIV/AIDS prevention and stigma.

COL also draws on global partnership to facilitate interpersonal communication, again facilitated by media. For instance, COL began its work in the Caribbean by selecting countries and key players within each Ministry in consultation with the regional office of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Subsequent activities have addressed agribusiness opportunities and environmental sustainability issues by delivering training and information from scientist to extension officer to farmer. Specifically, agricultural extension officers in the region have been taught camera and video production skills at the rural extension units to gather information on local agricultural issues. The work has also updated Ministry of Agriculture media units with digital technology and training to aid in the two-way flow of information among farmers, extension officers, and scientists. These video and audio productions - featuring localised content - reach farmers via radio, television, workshops, and field days.

To focus on one particular technology, COL uses low-cost suitcase FM radio to reach rural disadvantaged groups by sharing information related to health, basic education, and gender. The activities are also a vehicle to serve the role for advocacy of rural community radio as an effective means of addressing the Education for All targets. Besides the technical aspects of operating and maintaining the technology, business skills are also taught in an effort to foster the long-term sustainability of the rural FM stations. COL has been active in developing and promoting community radio in Cameroon, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Uganda.

Technology, Economic Development, Health, HIV/AIDS, Education, Gender, Natural Resource Management.

COL is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

According to COL, through NSGA village cinema events referenced above, the videos have "reached the entire secondary school sector and over half a million people, over half of the country's population." COL also claims that its work in agribusiness opportunities and environment in the Caribbean "has aided governments in the region in their efforts to move towards crop diversification (i.e., away from single-crop dependency such as bananas in Dominica or sugar in St. Kitts & Nevis) among small-plot farmers who have been sidelined by mass-produced food products from developed countries."