Pan-African podcasting

The popular newsletter, Pambazuka News is using new media to reach an even larger audience. Presenting information that can be watched or listened to will have a greater impact for its audience of social justice activists throughout Africa.

Pambazuka News is 300 issues and six years old and has an audience of around half a million readers. Produced by Fahamu (Networks for Social Justice), this pan-African weekly electronic newsletter has become one of the principal platforms for analysis, debate and discussion on issues related to the struggle for social justice in Africa. Last year, Pambazuka News featured 300 articles, written by 270 African authors, alongside 40,000 items of news, information and analysis available for free on the website.

Fahamu launched Pambazuka News to enable activists throughout Africa, working in different sectors, to discuss, debate and share information. It started by sending articles and summaries of key websites via email, as a way of bringing the web to those in Africa where poor bandwidth and connectivity make web access slow, frustrating and expensive. In fact, because this remains a problem for many people, Pambazuka News still goes out as an email every Thursday and Friday.

Given that Pambazuka News has been driven by the recognition of the constraints of poor bandwidth, it may seem curious that we have sought to produce bandwidth-hogging podcasts and videocasts. So why have we gone down that route?

Audience reach

Audiovisual media offer powerful means for enabling the voices of the oppressed and marginalized to be heard. We saw the potential for a pan-African service that could be developed without the need to negotiate licences or having to deal with the limitations imposed on commercial broadcasters. It could serve a wide audience and provide a perspective that is usually ignored by mainstream media. If someone had said to us six years ago that we would be reaching nearly half a million readers via the newsletter without forging an alliance with mainstream media magnates, we would have called them crazy. Yet that is what we’ve done. Could we pull off the same ‘trick’ with broadcasting over the internet?

Podcasting has the potential to enable activists and ordinary citizens engaged in the struggle for social justice, to plan, produce and edit their own ‘broadcasts’ without an interpretive or interfering intermediary, as happens so often in the mainstream media (whether written or broadcast). Given such developments, we felt it was important to encourage and support others in Africa who might either be using, or wanting to use new media, to make their voices heard. We were aware, of course, that current bandwidth constraints would preclude many people who already have internet access, from benefiting immediately. However, there are signs that this situation is likely to change significantly, especially for those in the main African cities, as the increasing investment in infrastructure is improving bandwidth and lowering the cost of access.

Experiment

Our experiments with podcasting began in September 2006, in a project supported by Hivos, a donor agency in the Netherlands. We wanted to complement a series of Pambazuka News special issues with a series of programmes on trade and justice. The task proved more difficult than we imagined. When we started, we naively thought that all we needed to do was to have someone read out some of the excellent articles published in Pambazuka News. We published a couple of podcasts of this kind, but the results were lacklustre. It was clear that what is produced for one medium (the written word) cannot be translated into another medium. The requirements of each medium are radically different.

To publish podcasts of a reasonable quality it was obvious that we needed to be clear about the specific aims and objectives of the programme, the message to be conveyed, and the target audience. We would also need:

• a capable interviewer who knows the subject and understands the need to keep the production short
• high-quality digital recording equipment
• an understanding of how to reduce the effects of extraneous noise, especially in places where a studio is not available,
• people with good post-production skills to convert content into recognizable programmes, complete with introductions, music, ending sequences, etc.
• facilities for uploading and disseminating the programmes (e.g. iTunes, a software programme for managing content on Apple iPod media players)
• a competent tagging system to enable others to find the podcast on the internet.

In essence, the facilities, equipment and skills needed to produce a podcast are little different from those required to make traditional radio programmes. But we also needed to understand the requirements of podcasting and the internet. None of us had any real experience when we started: we first had to find people who had the technical knowledge, and we needed time to experiment and learn. Fortunately, we established a relationship with the founders of Raised Voices, a project that enables marginalized people to speak out about environmental and social injustice by using short film clips. They helped us to learn the skills involved. And practice, combined with advice from experienced people, is critical.

Cooperation and distribution

What we are doing with new media at the moment is still only an experiment. We are engaged in a learning process that might allow us, over time, to share our experience with others. In launching our initiative, our intention was not merely to produce broadcasts ourselves. One of the keys to the success of Pambazuka News has been our policy of providing a platform for content produced by others. We have consciously avoided the temptation to use Pambazuka News to present our own voices. The same applies to the podcasts and videocasts – we want to provide a vehicle for material produced by others, to be used and reviewed by others. At present very few organizations in Africa have developed such material, but we hope that our initiative will stimulate them to experiment. We are already developing collaborations with organizations specializing in new media, such as the Johannesburg-based Community Media for Development (CMFD), with the aim of running training programmes for other social justice organizations in Africa.

In the last nine months we have published about 20 podcasts (and a couple of videocasts). These have mostly been interviews with grassroots activists, poets and artists, with some music and poetry. We also feature music from a variety of African artists which we include as a means of publicizing their work. The audience for these podcasts has been limited, with an average of 250 downloads from the website per podcast. But we have also distributed CD-ROMs, with broadcast quality files, to community radio stations in Africa and elsewhere. There are a growing number of websites that also distribute our podcasts, and we plan to cooperate with the US human rights organization, Witness, to provide content for their soon-to-be-launched project, The Hub. To date, we have broadcast two videocasts, one related to land reclamation by the descendants of African slaves in Brazil, and another on a poetry workshop held in Zimbabwe. They have averaged about 1000 downloads, but our experience in the use of video remains limited.

Our plans now are to develop further materials on women’s rights in Africa. Our own organization, Fahamu, together with the Nairobi-based African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) recently convened a meeting of 15 representatives of community radio stations in West and East Africa to plan out the details of a series of radio programmes based on the African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women. The themes to be developed include: women’s participation in politics; violence against women; marital rights; and reproductive rights and HIV/Aids. Our intention is to develop radio plays and current affairs programmes that will be broadcast via both mainstream media and through community radio stations, as well as being made available over the internet.

Firoze Manji is director of Fahamu – Networks for Social Justice and editor of Pambazuka News

Pambazuka podcasts and videocasts
Community Media for Development (CMFD)
Hivos
Raised Voices
Witness
African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET)