Getting the Voice of Rural Women Heard - Development Through Radio (DTR) Radio Listening Clubs, Zambia: Impact Evaluation Report

Objective 3: Getting the voice of rural women heard and influential in national development discourse
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The national audience

The club members know that they are heard and attended to by people across the country, and many anecdotes illustrate this. One member had heard from former schoolmates in the south of the country that they listen. Another had heard of a group of women interrupting their exhausting walk up from their remote valley home to join a group of women they passed on the way who were listening to and discussing a programme about nutrition. Several members had been urged by people they met while travelling to make further programmes about some issues – abortion, the inheritance law. The clubs coordinator recounted a conversation she had on a train: “I was talking to some people and one of the railway workers recognised my voice. He asked me, Was I Mrs Matabula, and I said, yes. He said, ‘I listen to your programme, and we like the way you bring up issues and you speak them.' I said, ‘Well, if you do wrong things ---look at this coach, it is very untidy, if we talked about that would you like it?' He said, in fact he tried to keep it as clean as possible, but people like throwing rubbish.”

The audience survey carried out just before these evaluation meetings confirmed the remarkable popularity of the programme:

• Of a sample of 328 respondents, in the outskirts of Lusaka and two different Bemba-speaking parts of the country, 54% were aware of the existence of the women's clubs, and 57% had heard some of the programmes. This included 45% of the people surveyed in Kabwe, a Bemba-speaking town several hundred kilometres from the project area, and 57% of the people surveyed in a district near Lusaka, for many of whom Bemba was not their first language.
• 51% of the sample described themselves as regular listeners, although only 68% of the sample had radio sets in their own homes.
• Of these regular listeners, 64% could recall topics they had heard programmes discuss, and 59% said they had learned significant lessons from the programmes.
• The programme was listed as sixth in popularity out of twelve Bemba-language programmes – in competition with long-established dramas, current events and family reunion programmes.

ZNBC's commitment

ZNBC has repeatedly stated and demonstrated its commitment to the project. It contributes the producer's time (about half of his full-time job), editing studio facilities and time, and the weekly half-hour airtime, free of charge. It also released the producer and senior staff members to participate in the regional DTR meeting Panos held in Harare in November 2000. ZNBC is keen to see the project extended to other languages, and the producers have already participated in a DTR training workshop (with the NGO Women for a Change, for a six-month civic education project). According to the Acting Controller of Programmes, since this project began, the other language producers have been asking to start similar projects themselves.

The Public Relations Director of ZNBC believes the DTR programmes are unique among ZNBC's programming. “It shows what a community thinks, in their own words. They say exactly what they want to say… If the programme could be introduced in other languages, to allow people to talk in their own language, in their own settings… [This is particularly valuable] in the absence of community radio in this country……It is definitely a programme we can be proud of.”

It was not easy to find out what other ZNBC staff members know and feel about the project. The PR director and Acting Controller of Programmes both said that the DTR programmes are widely known, and are emulated by other Bemba-language producers. One of these has worked on the project, and expressed to the evaluator her commitment to it; another, who has not been involved himself, was full of praise for the project and its impact. One of the producers in another language said he learned from, and sometimes used material from, the DTR programmes. Four or five other Bemba producers, and six producers in other languages, kept their opinions to themselves; (I sensed a slightly uneasy competitive atmosphere in ZNBC).

ZNBC bosses are keen to see the project extended into other languages, but will the producers in these languages be equally keen to be involved? The present producer has dedicated a lot of personal time and effort to the project for two and a half years, and he expressed some doubt whether his colleagues will be equally willing. The Acting Controller of Programmes said that the DTR programme does not involve more work than any other programme, but the producers thought differently. At the start of the project, it was expected that there would be members of ZAMWA, employed within ZNBC and ready to take up the challenge of the DTR project. The short period in 2000 when a ZAMWA member replaced the present producer showed that we can not take for granted that ZAMWA members will be willing to make the extra effort needed, without incentives. The present producer commented that ZAMWA is not a strong organisation at the moment, and its members don't take on activities for the organisation unless there is payment.

Power to expose failures

There is a clear feeling that voicing complaints through radio is much more effective than writing letters, which can more easily be ignored. One club chair said, “Everyone knows that everything has come from the radio, because in the past although you wrote a letter asking for something, [the authorities] were not considering it. Now they fail to hide it, because it was told openly, everyone was listening...so the one concerned has a problem thinking how he is going to answer.”

The clubs' requests have sometimes had very direct effects: a programme about a local councillor's obligation to make himself known to his community resulted in his being brought to visit them. (The club members are not entirely satisfied with this result: “Because we complained he was compelled to be brought here, but after that he has never appeared here again.”)

The project also led to the national exposure of a failing NGO. An NGO, Country Services, had made clear promises to provide some inputs to the clubs; when it failed to deliver, the clubs made a follow-up programme. This led to investigation by the authorities, and national media coverage of the discovery that the NGO was collapsing.

Dialogue with and influence over politicians

Do the clubs and communities feel they have power over politicians? The size of the audience must boost the power of the women's voices, though no evidence was gathered from politicians and decisionmakers themselves to show how they regard this.

Some club members feel the beginnings of dialogue - “We are proud that someone of that social standing responds to our concerns” - and confident that from their distant home they are communicating with ministers. In small ways there is evident influence: the area MP initially responded to complaints by providing materials for a school building from her Development Fund. Politicians and officials, including senior ones such as the Ministers for Home Affairs and Education, have been willing to appear in the programmes, explaining issues, making commitments and ordering action by district-level officials. It is not clear to what extent this has been the result of the producer's personal connections in the political world, rather than the politicians' feeling that radio in general is too important to ignore. All responses from senior officials and politicians have come about as the result of the producer asking them for a response. No clear evidence was found that they listen to the programme on air of their own accord.

An early and continuing supporter of the project, a development cooperation officer at the Netherlands Embassy in Lusaka, believes that politicians will continue being willing to speak on the programmes. They like the exposure, the campaigning platform, and the contact with rural people. This willingness to participate could potentially become dialogue, if the Radio Clubs are able to maintain response and counter-response, and hold the politicians accountable for what they say.

It is too early to say whether the clubs will be able to make their voices heard in policy discussion and influence legislation. A test case will be the inheritance law. The programme about this was the one that stimulated the most discussion in the clubs and communities. On the whole, the clubs rejected the existing law as it was explained to them by a Lusaka-based women's legal aid NGO. The law is supposed to favour widows, by preventing a deceased man's relatives from grabbing all his property. In the village view, however, it disadvantages the older generation, the deceased man's parents, who are likely to end up with responsibility for bringing up his children once his widow remarries. One thing the debate has achieved is to show how difficult it will be to design a law that will ensure justice in many different circumstances. The clubs were not yet sure what action they should take to get their views heard once a new government is in power after the forthcoming elections. A follow-up radio programme is proposed.

New information for NGOs

For ECLOF (Ecumenical Loan Fund) their appearance on a programme triggered a number of requests from other groups all over the country for ECLOF support. ECLOF realised that there was much more demand for their support than they had been aware of, and as a result they speeded up a process they were already engaged in, establishing partnership with the nationwide Chamber of Small and Medium Business Associations, to spread ECLOF services more widely.

After a DTR broadcast on maternal health problems and the lack of facilities in rural clinics, the USAID-funded Zambian Integrated Health Programme sent the producer to investigate the issues further, in June 2001. (He made two programmes as a result of this investigation, one documentary and one dramatised. They have been entered for a competition organised by the ZIHP). Other radio and print journalists were sent to investigate in other (non-Bemba) regions.

A Lusaka-based NGO, the Programme Against Malnutrition, invited the producer to participate in a workshop on empowering small-scale farmers. This NGO had not been invited to be a respondent in a DTR programme, so the producer assumes they must have heard the programmes on the radio.