Case study summary report
Published Nocember 10, 2003
By Maartje Op de Coul
Kothmale Community Radio (KCR) is one of five community radio stations operating under the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). It is located about 25km South West of Kandy. Kothmale started transmission in 1989, broadcasting only one hour a week from a mobile station. Now there are programs every day for 8 hours in the mornings and evenings. These are produced by a team of relief announcers (12), permanent staff (6) and a whole lot of enthusiastic volunteers. In the morning the programs are commercial and have local news. In the evening they are more development orientated. Most of the programs are in Singhalese, but they also broadcast in Tamil and English (for educational purposes). Kothmale estimates to reach about 30.000 listeners and receives a lot of letters and phone calls from them.
Internet radio
In 1999 UNESCO launched the Kothmale Community Radio Internet Project. In order to make the internet accessible to a wide rural audience, KCR started to include information from the internet in its radio programs. One example is the International News program presented by Sriyapali. She relies on international news sites. Although the majority of the listeners lives in remote area in Sri Lanka they are very much interested in international matters, because of family members living abroad. Part of the programme is dedicated to information about exchange rates and national market prices. One of the farmers who listens to the program states that ?since the program was first broadcast the prices have increased in different villages?.
Another good example of the use of internet and radio gives Sriyapali: ?One day we received 750 calls, because at that day exam results were published on the internet. We broadcast the results on the radio and informed the people who called by phone. Normally the results have to come from Colombo and that takes 4 days?.
Access points
Part of the KCR Internet Project was also to establish internet access points. In Kothmale there is currently only one computer with internet access available for the public, but in its heyday the access points were very popular. Nawalapithia and Gompola at this moment both have ceased to be public access points.Tanya Notley, and Australian volunteer, remembers "we had something like 10 people minimally a day with many large groups of school children.Young people had been reading about the internet for so long and they came with this incredible enthusiasm and awe".
UNESCO is aware that much of the equipment needs repair. They stopped their funding until KCR would submit to them an inventory of the technical problems. That has been done recently and hopefully this will lead to improvement, either supported by UNESCO or another donor.
Training
Along with the access points, Kothmale offers a 3 months training course, now only still working at the radio station access point. The course teaches introduction to the computer, windows and internet and e-mail. It is quite popular; the first batch was attended by 70 children and the second by 65. Reason for its popularity according to Sriyapali: ?they want to have a job in IT and there are many computer jobs in Sri Lanka?.
Another type of training offered by Kothmale is in making small publications. Participants hope to increase their chances on the labour market by obtaining the certificate of the Kothmale Mediacenter. But apart from 4 ex-students who have become (voluntary) teachers now, it is not sure if anyone else has yet found a job.
Lessons learned, impact and sustainability
The KCR Internet Project has been globally promoted as one of the "ICT for development" success stories which is why my expectations were quite high. However, at the time of my (short) visit, it was hard to get a feel of the successes that have actually been booked in the past. Fortunately Tanya Notley has been willing to provide me with the necessary historical perspective.
KCR undoubtedly plays an important role in the region. It succeeds to attract a great number of volunteers, young and old, and gives them the opportunity to develop all kinds of skills. At the time of my visit, the internet radio seemed to be the most successful part of the KCR Internet project, both in terms of impact and of sustainability. The impact on the listeners is that their general knowledge is updated and broadened and thus they are empowered. The internet radio is pretty sustainable as the producers of the internet programs do not have to put in extra energy or money. The internet now is an integrated part of program production and therefore sustainable at least as long as the station continues to be online?
The internet access points have turned out to be little sustainable and as they didn?t work at the time I visited I can only refer to other studies and experiences to get to the impact on the users. Tanya above all mentions the fact that the access points have helped so many young people to gain skills that have proven to be of vital use for their future, thus creating a lot of opportunities.
The training activities are sustainable in the sense that now they are all offered by volunteers that were trained by Kothmale first. The direct impact (opportunity), for instance in terms of people finding a job because of the training, is hard to measure.
Conclusions
It?s hard to tell who is ?to blame? for Kothmale's current problems. Though they started after UNESCO had left, their requirements do not seem unreasonable.The fact that KCR is almost entirely running on volunteers and low paid staff, that is likely to leave if a better opportunity shows up, doesn?t help. However, in their study Tacchi and Slater point out that the dependency of KCR on the Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation is an even bigger obstacle to financial and personnel sustainability. SLBC has put a limit to the number of hours and salary level of the relief announcers and all possible profits made by KCR have to be transferred back to SLBC. The project was simply never really owned by Kothmale and its community.
The radio station has gone through fluctuations before and there has been some restructuring in the SLBC, so things might turn to the positive again. That seems to depend on a good strategic and financial plan for which some external help is probably needed.
Resources
http://www.kothmale.net/
"Etnographic Monitoring and Evaluation of Community Multimedia Centres. Study of Kothmale Community Radio Internet Project, Sri Lanka", Don Slater, Jo Tacchi, Peter Lewis, September 2002
Read the full report on Kothmale Community Radio
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