We support community health on Mfangano Island, Kenya.
Our focus is on technology, social solidarity, and sustainability.
The Ekialo Kiona Community Radio Station
An EK Radio Committee meeting in the new EK Center
The Ekialo Kiona Community Radio (EKR) is a youth-driven community radio station that will bring together local residents to design programming that will cut to the heart of the health crisis on Mfangano today. Coordinated out of the Ekialo Kiona Center, the EKR will reach tens of thousands of people within a 30-kilometer radius along the shores of Lake Victoria.
Instead of messages coming from beyond Mfangano, this station will focus on issues affecting the immediate communities. Produced in Suba and Luo language, EKR will facilitate community-driven programs aimed at raising health and nutrition awareness, mobilizing youth activism, improving social solidarity, promoting sustainable agriculture and fishing innovation, and preserve the endangered Suba language and cultural identity. EKR will also help increase and maintain our 50+ micro-clnics of 5-25 people with practical tools to address the biological and social aspects of HIV/AIDS infection. This will finally give young people a chance to contribute their voices and cement a sense of solidarity for thousands of isolated people along the shores of Lake Victoria.
The Need for Community Radio on Mfangano:
In early 2008 the development community watched carefully as Kenyan political tensions and violence rose. A central policy issue was the role of the media, as there is no idependent public service broadcaster in Kenya. The problem facing Kenya's media is not an excess of media freedom, but rather a lack thereof. Imagine that your only source of information comes through a small radio receiver, the broadcasts of which are influenced by commercial and political constraints hundreds of miles away.
Independent local reporting and discussions free from constraint afford a solution. Community radio has emerged with a great credit in calming the violence during the disputed political election, which arguably provides a model for the future. Dissemination of valuable information in a timely manner is critical not only to individual safety, but also to sustainability for many living in rural communities. Without a means of cross-communication on the local level, the discussions become one-sided. For most listeners, questions remain unanswered and best practices are a foreign subject.
The Ekialo Kiona Community Radio, however, will contribute to increasing the plurality and diversity of media and cross-communication in Kenya. Through fair and balanced programming content, EKR will emply media as a platform for enhancing the democratic discourse and disseminating demand-driven social and economic extension services, on Mfangano Island and surrounding communities. Below see a map created by our partner Equal Access showing the broadcast reach out from Mfangano.
