Women in rural Ghana using radioIn Ghana, the livelihood of rural women is being improved through radio and other ICTs. At the time of writing the proposal, the initial was to train some women to act as radio hosts. However, further discussions revealed that this might not be sustainable after the project funding is over. Therefore, we liaised with Nabiina FM to partner and introduce the programme with funding from the CIC for the first 30 shows. A female professional DJ, Ms Philomena Aboko, would be the host of the programme.
During the second meeting, Ms Philomena was present. She took time to train the women leaders on how to serve as panellists in a radio discussion. The weekly show comes on every Thursday, from 7 to 8pm and is dubbed “Gender Focus”. The show covers a variety of themes affecting women – topics such as women in politics, marriage and its challenges, the indecent dress of young girls, stray animals and their effects on the farm, girl child education and discipline, negative traditional practices, female genital mutilation, women’s rights, sexually transmitted infections, women’s health and family planning, etc.
Achievements
The radio has helped significantly in sharing knowledge.
Meetings were held between the women leaders and the staff of the radio centre. During these meetings, the issue of knowledge sharing, especially using the medium of radio has been key. This has resulted in the successful holding of weekly discussions on Nabiina FM, the local community radio station. It became clear that the women were, indeed listening to the programme because of the comments they would make regarding the programme – things like it was not long enough to cover the subject in depth, they would invite other friends over to listen to it, they could not always call in to the programme because they did not have credits on their phones, and even the impact the programme had on their husbands and sons, and the desire to sustain the programme after the funding and project are over.
Female teachers are learning the relevant ICT skills for their work.
Because the literacy rates were quite low for most (women) beneficiaries, we realized that the use of computers would not be very significant to many of them. For this reason, we decided to turn to schools, where the impact of the project would be felt much more widely. The training was tailored to include a lot of hands-on exercises and a focus on the tools teachers would need to get their work done more efficiently.
Second cycle schools in the catchment area of the CIC were asked to nominate two female teachers each, for free training at the CIC as a part of the programme.
Training started in earnest and the teachers are wiling to make huge sacrifices, especially with their time to learn these relevant skills. Taught areas of Open Office have and will continue to focus on skills relevant to the school and classroom environment.
We noticed that attendance to training sessions was consistently high, and that the trainees would come to class with questions based on their own attempts to achieve a task outside of the training. They were also able to complete gradually more complicated hands-on tasks and act more independently.
Challenges
However, despite the success of the project so far, we have also encountered some challenges: time, distance and communication and costs. The time for the radio show is quite short – many women have expressed their desire for a longer show, but we cannot extend it because of the other scheduled programmes on the station and this would require additional funds. Some women also live quite far, making it difficult for them to attend panel discussions. Some of the women panellists also do not have radio or telephones, which also makes it difficult for them to follow the show on a regular basis. Many women are not literate, making it difficult for them to make good used of certain ICT devises like mobile phones for SMS. Also, due to the role of women in many communities, they must attend the markets in the early hours in order to do the trading for their homes. Clearly, the cost of landlines, mobile phones and phone credit were also a barrier to our achieving 100% results. The cost of these was a prohibiting factor to the participation of many women.
We have recently started to meet with staff of the two Vocational schools in the district to liaise with them and organise workshops on entrepreneurial skills capacity building for students of these schools. Incidentally both schools are single sex schools for females.
