May 25, 2005—Imagine members of a Pygmy community in the Congo Basin in Central Africa gathered around a radio listening to programs in their own language and featuring their own people. Imagine, too, farmers in rural Vietnam tuning their radio to listen to a soap opera preaching good environmental practices. Both of these scenarios are now set to become reality through the World Bank's Development Marketplace - a competitive grants program recognizing innovative environmental ideas. Pygmy Community Radio A total of $US150, 000 has just been granted for the establishment of the first-ever indigenous forest peoples' language radio station in Central Africa. For Scott Poynton, executive director of the Tropical Trust Fund, it's a significant move. It is about giving the Pygmy communities a voice in the decision making process involving forests in their area - something they don't have at the moment, Poynton says. The Tropical Trust Fund is working with a private company, Conglaise Industrialle des Bois (CIB), which manages 1.3 million hectares of forest in the Congo Basin in Central Africa. Poynton says CIB is seeking certification to an international standard, which requires that they work very closely with indigenous people. "The problem you have with indigenous people in this part of the world is that they are very hard to contact," Poynton says. "They don't have a written tradition, so you can't send them a letter. They move around the forests - you see them one day and the next day you go back to talk to them and they are not there. "They are an egalitarian society so you can't just talk to the village head, you've got to talk to everyone." "How to overcome all these obstacles and bridge the literacy divide is very difficult. So we talked with some experts who know the pygmy communities very well, and they said let's have a radio station. We said okay, let's try that." Poynton says the radio station will be run by the community, with the project distributing portable radios throughout the area. "It'll be run by the Pygmies. They gather the broadcast material themselves. We'll train them how to do that. So they'll have their own material on the radio and as part of that we'll also get in some debates or some discussion about forest management. They'll start getting a voice into forest management decision making which today they don't have." Poynton says at the moment, the indigenous population feels disenfranchised from the planning process for the forests. "When the company is about to harvest an area, they don't go out and sit down in the forest community and say, look, we're going to put a road through here, is that okay. They could be passing through traditional sites, religious areas -anything that's special to these communities. It just doesn't happen at the moment. The road goes through. So the Pygmy communities tend to feel a bit disenfranchised. "We can turn that around pretty quickly if we start having some dialogue."  |  |  | | Development Marketplace 2005: Environment Radio Soap Opera for Rural Vietnam |
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Soap Opera in Vietnam Dr. Monina Escalada describes radio as the most accessible communication medium in Vietnam - especially in rural areas. So it was radio that she and others turned to when considering how to spread messages about the environment to some 10 million rice farming households in the Mekong. The result is an innovative project using a radio soap opera to encourage farmers to halt environmentally unsound practices. Twice a week, Vietnamese rice farmers will be able to tune in to hear the thirty minute radio soap opera broadcast over Vietnam's national radio station, Voice of Ho Chi Minh, and other provincial stations. The soap opera will delve into the take of a real farm family. The novel plan is the brainchild of the International Rice Research Institute of the Philippines, partnering with Voice of Ho Chi Minh. It has been awarded US$131,800 from Development Marketplace to motivate farmers to modify their attitudes towards the environment. "We are combining entertainment and education in order to be able to communicate environmental ideas, " says Escalada, an international research fellow with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. "The radio drama on environmental issues will address farmers' unnecessary use of farm chemicals, excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, straw burning, excessive use of water and other environmental practices that they should not be practicing in the first place," she says. Escalada says at present the rice farmers don't care about the environment. "The prevailing attitude at the moment is more is better - more pesticides and more fertilizer - because farmers believe that to use more is to be modern," she says. Escalada is confident the environment radio soap opera will work. "In Vietnam, we have a captive audience because there's only one national radio station, called Voice of Ho Chi Minh, and there are provincial stations. And we have complementary extension activities to reinforce the soap opera." These activities include radio clubs and weekly prize giving competitions posing questions and asking the audience to send in their answers. "In the pilot program we ran, thousands of letters were sent to the station, so the response has been overwhelming." "This is just the beginning. We hope this will spread to North Vietnam and central Vietnam as well." |
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