Providing Radio for Eight Million Afghans

DAVID TRILLING/INTERNEWS Last year Internews Afghanistan trained over 700 media professionals in radio production and station management. Here, trainees practice their interviewing techniques.

"I know how to read and I read newspapers whenever I find one, about once a year,” a villager in Afghanistan’s remote Bamiyan province told an Internews survey team.

His comment underscores the central importance of radio as a source of news in Afghanistan, where an estimated 75% of the population is illiterate, but nearly all homes have at least one radio.

In the past year and a half, Internews has set up 29 independent radio stations around the country, with plans for one more. These stations currently reach over eight million Afghans, or 42% of the population. For many of these listeners, an Internews-founded station is the only radio station that reaches them.

“In Afghanistan, we’re trying to establish a local media in its most accessible form for a population which has been ignored and isolated,” said Sanjar Qiam, Internews Afghanistan’s Radio Network Coordinator.

In Afghanistan’s central highlands, Radio Bamiyan, which reaches 22,000 people, is so popular that some villagers have erected two-meter high home-made radio antennas in (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to receive its signal from outside the coverage area.

Eight of the Internews-supported stations are already financially self-sufficient, earning enough money from advertising, public service announcements, and letters from listeners to cover their operating costs.

“HELLO MY COMPATRIOTS”

From its extensive headquarters in Kabul, the mostly Afghan staff of Internews Afghanistan also produces a daily national news and entertainment program, Salaam Watandar (Hello My Compatriots), which is distributed to radio stations by satellite and reaches the whole country. The program currently airs four hours per day with a dozen journalists reporting from around the country.

“Salaam Watandar is unique in that it is spoken in a combination of Afghanistan’s main two languages, Dari and Pashto,” said Internews Country Director Jon Newstrom. “A sentence may begin in one language and continue in another. Most Afghans can understand some of the other language and many communicate in both.

“By doing this we are trying to create an Afghanistan. It’s too easy for the country to break down along ethnic and tribal lines,” said Newstrom. “Creating a global village is a large part of the Salaam Watandar mission.”

AN ECHO ACROSS THE LAND

As part of its efforts to provide Afghans with quality news and information programming, Internews helped found the Tanin Network (Tanin means “Echo” in both Dari and Pashto). Tanin is a consortium of a dozen groups that distribute their programming to 55 media outlets around the country each day.

Internews’ Kabul office spends over $5000 per month on blank CDs to burn for Tanin programming, and then distributes these to radio, TV and newspaper outlets around the whole country—all by taxi!

AFGHAN WOMEN TAKE TO THE AIR

Four years ago, under Taliban rule, there were no women in the workforce in Afghanistan. Internews has been working hard to train a new generation of female journalists.

Internews and the stations it has founded now employ 97 female journalists, or 31% of the news and production staff.

KABUL HEADQUARTERS

The Kabul office of Internews has a staff of 155, all but four of whom are Afghan. Internews’ work in Afghanistan is funded by grants from the US Agency for International Development, the European Commission, the International Organization for Migration, and the Asia Foundation.