Community radio

What is community radio? What are its the benefits and its disadvantages?

A community radio can be defined as a radio station that is set to serve a specific community. A community radio station caters for the information for the people living in a particular geographical location, village, town or district. Community radio broadcast the content that is popular and relevant to that specific audience. There are three different types of radio; religious based, language based and educational radio station. In Namibia there up to nine community radio station namely; Channel 7 ( a multilingual religious based radio station), UNAM FM, NUST FM, Shipi FM, Radio wave, !Ha radio, Karas community radio, O’FM, Ohangwena community radio to mention few of them.

The community radio has a big social, political, economic impact to the society. It provide the community member with news bulletins, current affairs, sport news, culture and health related programmes. Community radio plays a significant role to the society by providing the member of the community by allowing them to participate in program making, management and ownership, of the station. It also enables the community member to have access to the information concerning them. It is relevant, cheap and fast in terms of communication. Community radio promotes and improves problem solving by providing information and topics of conversation through shared experiences and hence facilitates personal contact. It allows creativity, promotes democracy and informs the community about the latest information.
 

A community radio encourages community and connects people to the community. They use the language that is easily understandable to the people in that community. It serves a large scale and informs listeners about their local issue. It also motivates the community in sharing ideas, its programs are relevant to the community, allow individuals to exercise choice, make decisions and act as responsible citizens.

On the other hand community radio always experience financial problems(lack of funding) and most of them relay on advertisers and sponsors. Since most of the people who work for community are volunteers, they may not have sufficient presentation skills. There is also lack of vital skills, such as marketing, budgeting, planning and fund-raising. With community radio competition is very high. There is  also  lack of broadcasting equipment to do live outside broadcasting.

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