Community Radios Struggle for Survival

As Liberia emerges from years of civil war, dozens of new community radio stations are struggling to find the means to stay afloat and play an important role in the country's fragile new democracy.

Radio Kergheamahn in Ganta is typical of the new stations across the country that IRIN Radio partners in its Liberia project.

Kergheamahn means ‘togetherness’ in Kpelle, the most widely spoken language in the Ganta region. The station’s main objective is to help build reconciliation in a region where inter-ethnic tensions still run high.

Ganta, in Liberia’s north-eastern Nimba County, was the scene of heavy fighting in March 2003. Nyan Flomo, the radio’s director, remembers coming back after the fighting “to find all the trees destroyed by bullets and rocket particles”.

With equipment and some training provided by American NGO Mercy Corps, the station opened at the end of 2004.

Kergheamahn, which broadcasts in five local languages and English, has tried to come up with programmes that serve the community. ‘Soil is the Bank’ offers advice to farmers. ‘Today’s Business’ keeps traders up to date on the prices of commodities.

IRIN Radio has provided capacity building training for the station's staff and has worked on a number of coproduced programmes with Kergheamahn reporters.

But despite significant cross-border trade and signs of a modest economic upturn in Ganta, most of the population still lives in extreme poverty.

Photo: IRIN

Radio Kergheamahn reporters interviewing local people for a coproduction programme with IRIN Radio

Flomo and his colleagues have come up with various moneymaking ventures, such as a cold-water business and an information centre offering Internet access. But the station depends on birth, death and marriage announcements, along with music requests, to keep operating.

“Keeping the station on the air is a challenge,” admits Flomo. The station broadcasts 14 hours a day. During that time the all-important generator will consume 3.5 gallons of fuel. The stipend for staff, all working as volunteers, depends on what is left over after paying the running costs.

Liberia’s radio stations are nominally owned by their respective communities, with an elected board helping to raise money and taking an interest in the station’s output and welfare.

Hector Mulba, the station manager of Radio Gbehzohn in Buchanan, says there is little money available locally. “If people had the money they would support the station,” Mulba insists. “But often they don’t have the first cup of rice, so to support radio is not easy. But from the moral point of view they support us 100 percent.”

Having lost its original transmitter to lightning, Kergheamahn managed to secure US$900 from local contributors, with churches holding a benefit concert.

Flomo says his broadcasters understand the reality. “We always tell them: if you live in the community, you owe so much to the community. If you don’t put your service into the community, the community is not going to be what you expect it to be.”