The Power of a Voice

By Celeste Larkins

Jason Bartlett, one of the powerful voices of the Bartlett Brothers (a well-known Indigenous band), a husband and a father of two daughters, sadly passed away in 2017.

I had the privilege of meeting Jason at Royal Perth Hospital, after a local partner organisation, the Western Australia Centre for Rural Health (WACRH), at the request of Jason, asked HCR to produce a film sharing Jason’s story.

His words “There is no future, that’s it, at an early age I’m going, 36 years old and I’m looking down the barrel of a gun,” were a harrowing reminder that Jason only had weeks to live due to complications relating to diabetes.

Jason was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 19, and due to lack of information and mismanagement of the condition his health deteriorated. He lost his vision because of glaucoma, developed foot ulcers that wouldn’t heal and had heart and kidney failure which ultimately led to his death.

Knowing he didn’t have long left to live, Jason wanted to share his story urging Australians to look after their health, especially looking at their alcohol consumption. He stated that if he could go back in time he would “never have touched the bottle (alcohol).”

Jason passed away nine days after the video was filmed, and what happened next is a testament to how powerful one person’s message can be.

Honourable Ken Wyatt, Minister for Aged Care and Minister for Indigenous Health, launched the film Passing on Wisdom: Jason’s Diabetes Story at an event on Saturday 9th December, where reporters from various commercial stations were present.

Left to right: Lenny Papertalk from WACRH, Minister Ken Wyatt and Celeste Larkins

That night, Jason’s story was shared on all the commercial WA state news programs, as well as some at a national level. His story was shared on a few of these commercial stations’ Facebook pages, with over 49 000 views, 470 shares and 440 likes or interactions. ABC Radio National shared Jason’s story, as well as the National Indigenous Radio Services and the Community Radio Network. To make his story more accessible we developed a radio component, which many community stations have broadcast. Jason’s story was published on several news sites.

From what started as a low-key production intending to be shared within Jason’s family and their networks, the film ended up travelling far and wide and reaching more people than anticipated. I even received a phone call from a community station in Yarralin (a small remote Aboriginal community, 705kms from Darwin) thanking me for producing a radio component as it meant their community had access to a powerful message that affects many Indigenous Australians.

Although Jason has passed, his story will remain and hopefully inspire us all to assess our lifestyles and improve our health to live life to the fullest and enjoy time with our loved ones. His story has reached across Australia, and will continue to be a powerful tool to raise awareness about diabetes. The video and radio component would not have been possible without funding from WACRH, support in its launch from Honourable Minister Ken Wyatt, and most importantly support from Jason’s wife and family.

Please help the project by watching the video and sharing it with your friends and family.

Stories Promote Peace in Eastern Kenya

By Jon Hargreaves

“I never realised how the Orma people came to be in this region of Kenya,” said a retired teacher from Tana River, “but since I started hearing their stories on the radio, I have begun to understand them better.”

The man, from a rival community, was responding to a series of cultural programmes he had heard on a new station set up by HCR and its partners, Amani (Peace) FM, in this conflict-affected region of eastern Kenya.  The programmes are made by Mole Hashako Yako, a community activist, teacher and social historian.  The Orma people of Tana River don’t have a written history, so Mole has been talking to elderly people in her community who have a rich knowledge about the past, and then telling their stories on the radio.

“Telling stories about our past, not only helps young people in the Orma community understand their roots and identity, but it also helps promote empathy and understanding between the communities,” she said.  “Once you hear someone else’s story, you humanise them and begin to understand them.”  Although there has been conflict particularly between the pastoralist Orma and agriculturalist Pokomo communities in recent years, Mole points to the past and to a time when the two communities lived side-by-side in peace and harmony.  She believes the past will help the communities connect with the future, where Tana River can be peaceful and prosperous.

Mole Hashako Yako: Telling stories promotes empathy and understanding between communities.

Amani FM was established in August ahead of Kenya’s controversial elections in an effort to promote peace and build on and complement the work of Una Hakika which has been combatting rumours and misinformation since 2013.

John Green, the Director of Una Hakika, who is also chairman of the board of Amani FM, says that without a shadow of a doubt, Amani FM has contributed to peace at a time when there were many rumours circulating, which could have resulted in violence.  During focus groups conducted this week, among different communities, John says people appreciated how well Amani FM had advocated for peace and that how integrating the work of Una Hakika and the radio has produced a powerful model of using technology and relationships to foster peace and development.

A mother, but still a child

Early marriage is a major obstacle for girls in acquiring education and has many physical, social and psychological implications. The girls are forced into this cycle of poverty, inequality and illiteracy.

One of the solutions to assist girls to escape discriminatory customary practices like early child marriage is providing education and skill building opportunities. Education is the most valuable asset and ultimately empowers the girls to reach their fullest potential.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which define global development include target 5.3 ‘Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilations’ (under Goal 5 ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’).

HCR faces these issues in some of the communities in which we work. Recently, in a village in Pakistan, an HCR associate was confronted with child marriage at a women’s empowerment session. A girl, aged 15, had an eighteen month old baby and was married to a 45 year old man. She is a mother, when she herself is still a child. In a culture that tends to be patriarchal, the birth of a son is celebrated as boys are considered assets who will provide support for ageing parents, whereas a daughter is often considered a liability. This traditional culture, along with poverty, reinforces practices like early child marriages.

At HCR we continue to work towards the education of girls and women all over the world and target many of the underlying issues that keep them in a cycle of poverty.  

'Who will marry you?'

By Hazeen Latif

Sahib Gul is 25 years of age and has never been able to walk. He uses his arms to go places in the community. The ground is covered with dust, stones, glass and rubbish. Sahib Gul’s hands get dirty, cut and blistered. He never thought he would be respected in the community. Almost every day he hears humiliating remarks from the community, even from relatives. Street kids taunt and tease him about his short stature.

His uncles and parents comment, “Who will marry you, your clothes and hands are always filthy, and how will you stand or walk with your wife”. These words have always echoed in Sahib Gul’s mind, that he is not worthy of a family life.

However, through all this, he has remained hopeful that someday he will hold his head high and have a family. This is what he shared with me when I met him a year ago.

Sahib Gul in 2016

A year on and things have changed. Recently HCR gifted Sahib Gul a wheelchair.

Sahib Gul's response:

‘I am so much more confident sitting in this wheelchair. I feel I have got my own feet I am no longer on the ground. To me it's not a wheelchair but it’s a journey from being dependent to independent. Through this wheelchair I can earn, contribute financially for my family, and will have a beautiful wife of my dreams. Now, no one can say, “who will marry you?”’

Sahib Gul in June 2017, after receiving his wheelchair

A Voice For Peace in Troubled Mindanao

By Ross James and Jon Hargreaves

Amidst the turmoil on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, following clashes between government forces and Islamic militants, a voice for peace continues to ring out.  Radio Gandingan, an HCR-supported community-centred radio project, is providing critical information to residents and displaced people from Marawi city, where the fighting first broke out on 24th May.  A number of people were killed and taken hostage by the militants who had reportedly occupied several government buildings in the city, torched others, including a church, a school and the city jail and took over a medical centre where they replaced the Philippines flag with a black, ISIS-style banner.

Community volunteers from Radio Gandingan out and about in Mindanao

Meanwhile Radio Gandingan is helping provide critical information about the situation and the martial law rules that have been imposed by the government of President Rodrigo Duterte. Community volunteers are working around the clock to provide up-to-date information and the station’s popular serial radio drama now includes the Marawi situation into its story-lines.

Since 2004 Radio Gandingan has been broadcasting in the primary language of the minority Magindanaon people, empowering them to voice their concerns and gain access to government officials and services to improve their quality of life.  Preliminary results of an evaluation currently underway by HCR shows how the project has helped community cohesion by resolving family and community conflict, strengthened family bonds and relationships and improved understanding between community members and leaders.   Radio Gandingan listeners have also expressed how the project has helped to improve health and develop livelihoods in their communities.

Relationships built on trust

By Hazeen Latif

Sitting in a “hujra” (a room in the house for meetings and discussions) my host’s uncle asked me, “What is your interest in coming to our village (Swabi, KPK)?”  This question is rarely asked of anyone when it comes to hospitality in KPK region, a province to north of Pakistan.

Before any kind of reply from me, my friend’s (the host) uncle changed the tone and said, “Oh, you must not misunderstand me. It rarely happens that people come to visit us in this hot weather, with no facility of any kind in the village, and having to sit on the ground with us. Please do not take this the wrong way as we are honored by your presence.” This dialogue gave me an opportunity to share how I felt in their midst. It was through my friend that I had been invited to visit the community and asked to help the community become healthy and prosperous. I told them that my visit to the community was the fulfilment of a promise to my friend; no more than that.

In the hujra (house), a council member from government was present who was elected to the union council for that region comprising of eight villages of which one was the village where I was sitting. All the men agreed to develop a CBO (community based organisation) for the villages. They all happily decided on the name which is Khush-hali meaning prosperity. Amazingly, they all agreed on the name. With my guidance, they identified the issues of the community for the first time and even proposed some solutions.  Major issues which came up in our discussion were education for all, but mostly for girls, and health issues as there is only one BHU (basic health unit) operational in the region for over ten thousand adults in the union council. Other issues discussed were youth being neglected, hygiene and poor infrastructure. The men asked me to develop a program and to proceed in developing Khush-hali by establishing a proper legal frame work. The meeting ended with a delicious lunch we all shared by eating from the one dish.     

Call for peacebuilding radio station ahead of Kenya's election

By Jon Hargreaves

With just over four months until Kenya goes to the polls amidst concerns that there will be election-related violence, HCR is exploring the feasibility of a new radio station in eastern Kenya's Tana Delta.   

Last year we partnered with the Sentinel Project to set up a peace centre in the town of Garsen. In this interview, John Green from Una Hakika describes how rumours and misinformation are often a key driver in the conflict between different groups and how a radio station could help build peace in the region. 

Since the nineteenth century, eastern Kenya's Tana River County has often been the scene of violent conflict, largely between two ethnic groups, the dominant Orma, who are nomadic cattle-herders and the Pokomo, who are farmers.   Many of the disputes have been over land use and access to water, however the intensity of these conflicts has increased in recent decades.  This has been fuelled by the easy access of weapons flooding across the nearby border with Somalia, growing poverty, the pressure caused by poorly managed resources and political interference.  Add to that toxic mix, the extremist group Al Shebab, which is trying to destabilise Kenya and Tana River County, is at risk of descending into violent conflict.

In June 2015, HCR, helped a Hola-based community organisation, Kenya Sustainable Health Aid to establish Tana FM which is now on the air supporting the peacebuilding process in the region in the run-up to August's critical election.

Got my confidence back!

On 26th February, Hazeen Latif, Director of HCR in Pakistan visited Charsadda to present a refresher course for a previous radio group who were trained in 2014. The meeting was held at the residence of Asad Ullah, an active community member and a certificate holder of the HCR Radio Skills Training Workshop.

The content of the refresher course covered the strengths and weaknesses of radio, types of microphone, how to use the microphone, and target the audience. The participants found the training valuable, and in the words of Asad Ullah, “this refresher course has helped me get my confidence back in using the microphone and availing myself of every opportunity as host of a program on my local FM station. Thanks so much to HCR for their follow up and support."

Hazeen as he facilitates the refresher course

Disaster Response Radio TRAINING IN Pakistan

Photo courtesy of First Response Radio

Following the Asia Tsunami and numerous earthquakes in Pakistan, radio broadcasters have come to see the need for a fast, disaster-response radio plan to assist in recovery from a disaster.  Based on these experiences, HCR worked with broadcasters to develop the programme now used by the First Response Radio Network (FRR) which includes training in the needed equipment, a programming system based on the listeners' need for critical information and a workshop to teach radio journalists, relief workers and government personnel how to put these into use in the field.  Since 2007 over 12 workshops have been held across the Philippines, India, Nepal and Indonesia.

In collaboration with First Response Radio, a 5-day workshop and 3-day field trial will be held in Pakistan from 21st to 29th March, 2017.   For more information to be a participant or observer, please contact hazeen@h-c-r.org.

To be heard...

By Annie Sarfraz

Over 40 people participated at a community meeting in the village of Swabi, KPK, Pakistan, organised by HCR in January 2017. The purpose was to help community understand they have the capacity to bring about positive change in their community. Most of the members said they had never attended a meeting where everyone was given an opportunity to introduce themselves. It was important for HCR to ensure participation from all groups of the community. In particular, youth are generally not encourage to be part of any decision making, something that is traditionally left up to the community Elders. However, this was the first time all age groups had come together to discuss community issues, and for many the first time they were heard.

A senior spokesperson from the community endorsed what was said by HCR's Hazeen Latif, "we have to unite and become an agent of change rather than an object to change". At the conclusion of the meeting, Hazeen was thanked by all, "we have never talked in front of so many people, thank you for giving us the opportunity"!

Rain can't stop us

By Annie Sarfraz

Community leader: “Sir, you could have cancelled the meeting and stayed home. It’s been raining for the last three days”.

Hazeen: “Rain can’t stop us”!

HCR has been working in Charsadda village in Pakistan since 2013, using the communication for development approach to help people identify, understand and resolve their health and social development issues and challenges. Many successful community initiatives have come from this approach such as the medical camp, cricket tournament, well water project, and the microenterprise awareness campaign. These have helped the community realise the importance of social capital and the power of people to challenge and change the circumstances of life.

A meeting facilitated by Hazeen Latif was held at a primary school which did not have benches or chairs. Instead, members sat on jute cloth mats. Even with rain and extremely cold weather conditions, members of the community participated and gave their consent to form a Community Based Organisation (CBO). Hazeen asked the group “what do you want your children to become”? One of the members who is a tailor said,”I want my son to become a doctor not less than that”. A fish seller wants all his five children to become educated and never ever sell fish. HCR will continue to work with the group to identify issues and challenges faced by the community, and work with the community to develop ways to overcome these.

Local heros make a difference in Pakistan village

By Hazeen Latif

Sahib Gul may be disabled, but his talent for art and music speaks for itself and he is a person who never gives up.  “My name is Sahib Gul, which means king of the roses,” he told a meeting of the newly established ‘New Dawn Community Services’, a community-based organization (CBO) in a village in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.  “I love to sing, it’s my passion,”  he said, as he began to demonstrate his great voice and amazing ability to “beatbox”.  

Sahib Gul is just one of the many community members that has benefited from HCR’s ‘New Dawn’ project, which inspired the local community to register a CBO to help us bring health and development to the village.  “I may be crippled and disabled,” Sahib Gul told me, “but I want to help my community.” 

We have been working in KPK Province since 2014 on a number of projects including micro-enterprise development, a mobile health clinic, radio programming and most recently a new well for clean drinking water.   The well has been so successful that many have stopped going to the local health worker with stomach complaints.  Zahid, who has a clinic nearby, showed me the incoming patients register saying, “Now, fewer patients are coming with gastrointestinal problems.” Sahib Gul has also been feeling much better after using the new bore water.

It’s a privilege to be working in this area, with people who really want to make a difference and take responsibility for their own change.  To me, they are local heroes.  As I met recently with the community for the second monthly meeting to form the CBO, we began to lay plans for next year, to do more to help in the area of health, education and we will be developing FM radio programmes to be a voice for the voiceless.    

Local artist and musician Sahib Gul demonstrates the art of beatboxing

“Better than Nestle's!” - Clean water brings health to Pakistan community

By Jon Hargreaves

“You have lost me my business,” health clinic owner,  Zahid jokingly tells HCR Pakistan director Hazeen Latif.   He was speaking at the opening of the new drinking well in his village, provided by HCR, funded by an Australian church.  “Since this well opened three weeks ago,” Zahid says, “I am selling less Flagyl because fewer people are having stomach problems.”  With a smile on his face he says, “this water is even better than Nestlé's.”  The well project was a result of a consultation facilitated by HCR which identified some of the main needs facing the community. 

Schoolboy tries the clean drinking water from the new well in his village, KPK province, Pakistan

HCR has been working in this village in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province since 2013, helping the community understand and tackle their health and social development challenges.  “It has been such a privilege to walk alongside this community for the last three years and feel like I’m part of them,” says Hazeen.  “During that time we’ve seen some great things happen, like the medical camp that HCR sponsored with a local partner. We also sponsored a community cricket match and have done a micro-enterprise project, "he added,"but perhaps the most difficult time was when a nearby school was attacked by terrorists and I experienced the grief the community was going through."

HCR has been working in Pakistan in development and disaster response since 2013, with a vision of seeing whole of life transformation in some of the most challenging places in the country.

Well-digging in KPK, Pakistan is very manual (Video)

The Yalgoo Emu Cup

By Celeste Larkins

We have just arrived back from attending our second Yalgoo Emu Cup. Last year the sun was shining, so much so that one of the Radio MAMA staff members got heatstroke. There was definitely no heat stroke this year! We arrived to rains and a freezing cold wind, but that didn’t stop the community from having fun. Children were playing in the paddle pools (I shiver just thinking about it), jumping on bouncy castles, making their emu costumes and getting involved in the organised games. One community member said “The rain is good, it brings us all closer together, not just in terms of distance”.

When the storm hit, the whole community was huddled together underneath cover, except for some children who embraced the rain. Dane and I helped Radio MAMA do a live broadcast from the Emu Cup. We chatted on-air with lots of children, a well-known Indigenous hip hop artist, Bryte MC, as well as lots of community members including a gentleman who came to Australia from Chile as a political refugee 30 years ago! Even though the fireworks had to be cancelled, it was still a great event. Dane and I love how we are able to involve community people to be part of radio.

Barry from Radio MAMA, and Celeste broadcasting at the Yalgoo Emu Cup.

The highlight of the day was the stunning headline act, The Merindas, an Indigenous R&B soul group who sing a lot of motown hits, but have also just released an original song. They make their own costumes and are genuine down to earth people. Even though they were exhausted from a whole week of work-shopping with children from Geraldton and Yalgoo, they agreed to meet me on Sunday morning at 8am, so I could interview them about how they got to where they are today. The recorded interviews will be broadcast on the show I host on Radio MAMA, On the Road, which uses music and yarning to connect the Mid West and Gascoyne. If you ever want to tune in you can by selecting ‘Listen Live Geraldton’ at http://www.mama.net.au/. The show is on each Monday at 11am.

Celeste with the very beautiful and talented Merindas!

* Yalgoo is a town in the Murchison region, 499 kilometres north-north-east of Perth, Western Australia. 

Mental Health Week

This year Mental Health Week was from 8th-15th of October. During the week communities hold programs and events to raise awareness of mental health, with a focus on suicide prevention. Suicide is a leading cause of death for males and females aged between 15 to 44 in Australia (ABS, 2008). Almost eight Australians take their own lives every day (ABS, 2016). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are twice as likely to die by suicide (ABS, 2015).

Our HCR team, Dane Waters and Celeste Larkins, based in Geraldton, travel to communities in the Mid West, Murchison and Gascoyne and support the community to address local issues through community media. They know too well that mental health and suicide prevention is a main issue in all the communities they work, particularly for Aboriginal people.

Along with the continuing work HCR do to raise awareness of mental health and suicide prevention in rural and remote WA, in the lead up for Mental Health Week, Dane and Celeste assisted the local Geraldton suicide prevention working group to develop community service announcements (CSAs). These were broadcast through Radio MAMA and Meeka FM.

HCR also supported an event held in Geraldton, and were part of an outside broadcast put on by Radio MAMA. Community members and service providers participated in the broadcast. This ensured information not only reached Geraldton, but also Mullewa, Meekatharra and Carnarvon.

If you want more information on mental health visit: https://www.beyondblue.org.au/ or see your local GP.

Dane in the middle recording the Drumbeat circle. Drumbeat is a program that can be used as part of therapy for someone with a mental health illness.

How HCR helped Gorbachev achieve glasnost in the USSR

We’ve been looking through HCR’s archives and have asked our founder, Dr Ross James, to explain the story behind some of the photos. 

By Ross James

By 1989, Russia’s leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev had orchestrated a reorientation of Soviet strategic aims that contributed to the end of the Cold War and brought in an era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe were defeated in elections, and the East German Government opened the Berlin Wall. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1991.

In these tumultuous years I was living and working in Pakistan and was part of a small team that travelled to Russia to support a group of people who wanted to broadcast radio programs responding to a vacuum of family, spiritual and social values in a country that was collapsing. Crime, corruption, alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, hunger and unemployment now besieged a despairing people who had been denied freedom of expression, religion and individual empowerment for decades.

I have many memories of that time: of when we ate radish for breakfast because of the scarcity of fresh food but fed a starving cat scavenging beneath the tables of a dilapidated café a bowl of caviar because it was so plentiful; of not just one but many old women sitting on a footpath, pathetic in their attempts to sell a pair of used shoes or two tomatoes. But nothing will erase the memory of working with that first generation of broadcasters no longer coerced into thinking and behaving according to the collective ideology that had shaped their entire existence and which was now crumbling to pieces around them.

One of our sessions was in the training room of a radio station with powerful transmitters for jamming political and religious broadcasts from outside of the Soviet Union. Those transmitters were now silent, no longer churning out annoying and disruptive signals on the same frequencies as foreign broadcasts intended for Soviet audiences. But ideological apparatus remained around the radio facility: statues of Marx, Lenin, Stalin. In our training room, large portraits featuring their stern images looked down on us, as we developed a suite of communication strategies and radio programs that, over the next few years, had much positive impact on the lives of listeners. Let alone not having the opportunity to voice their concerns about family and social issues before, none of our group had any broadcasting experience.

In this photo, a translator is helping me to work through a programmer’s proposals during a mentoring session on a launch on the Amur River that flows through Khabarovsk, 30 kilometres from the Chinese border in Siberia.

The HCR family comes together for the first time ever!

HCR Australia was founded in 1993 by Dr Ross James who has extensive knowledge in communication for development. Since then, HCR entities have been established in United Kingdom and Pakistan. Each HCR entity works together towards the common goal of supporting marginalised communities through community-centred media.

In the last week of August, for the first time the HCR trans-national network came together for an intensive week of planning to see how we can support more communities in need. It was a productive time of discussion, and although we were all exhausted by the end of the week, we were all assured by the work HCR is doing in remote Western Australia, Pakistan, Philippines and countries in Africa to support the transformation of communities.

There is a lot more work to be done, but we are all very excited to see the future of HCR.

From Left to Right: Celeste Larkins and Dane Waters (AU), Hazeen Latif (PAK), Jon Hargreaves (UK), Alex Stout (UK), Ross and Jill James (AU), Kit Ng (AU), David and Jan Bayliss (AU), Alex Williams (UK Board).

A water resource management student gets involved in...radio!

MSc Student, Joseph Thompson has just completed writing up his research which he conducted at HCR's partner project, Tana FM in Eastern Kenya during June and July.  A student of water resource management at Wageningen (Holland) and Copenhagen (Denmark) Universities, Joe’s research addressed the conflict over resources in the region and particularly how the radio station, Tana FM, is playing a role in building peace by promoting dialogue, sharing knowledge and engaging all sides in the conflict.  

During his time in Tana River, Joe worked closely with producers to make radio programmes to tackle some of the key themes that emerged during the research process which helped different tribes to better understand each other.  In one programme on tribalism for example, participants in the programme took turns in teaching a proverb in their mother tongue to a person from another tribe, explaining the meaning of the proverb.  Needless to say this resulted in a lot of laughter and a kind of “humanising” of the other side.  Involving the wider community in the programmes promotes dialogue and understanding, a key HCR principle.

Joseph with Tana FM producers Zeinab Hussein and Galana Galole

A talented bunch...?

In the Mid West, HCR works primarily with community radio stations and partners who rely on community radio for communication support. HCR has had dealings with the community radio broadcast sector over a number of years because we greatly support the role of community-run radio stations, such as the Mid West Aboriginal Media Association (Radio MAMA). Stations such as these are an important cultural and social asset in regional and remote areas. And so we are happy to offer our support to the sector in another way. Our own Ross James has been appointed to the assessor pool of the Community Broadcast Foundation. The assessors voluntarily commit some time to independently consider and provide advice on grant applications from community radio stations. Thanks go to Radio MAMA for sponsoring Ross in his appointment as their representative.

(Cheeky note from Editor: The CBF announcement stated, “This talented bunch will start in their new roles on 1 July”. We note they didn’t mention Ross hee hee).

Peace centre for Kenya's troubled Tana River

HCR and Canadian-based Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention, are about to set up a "Peace Centre" in the conflicted east Kenyan region of Tana Delta.   The centre will be established in the town of Garsen and will serve as a hub to analyse misinformation and rumours, as well as disseminate reliable information and messages that promote peace through HCR partner station Tana FM.  Kenya’s eastern Tana River County has frequently been affected by violent conflict between different ethnic groups, with rumours and misinformation among the key drivers of the conflict. 

In April, HCR specialists joined Tana FM producers in training a team of citizen journalists from Sentinel's Una Hakika project in how to create radio programme content that builds peace.  Una Hakika project coordinator John Green praised the new venture saying:  “People make decisions based on information, so when they receive information that is verified and from a neutral source that has no ethnic bias, it is a milestone in the peace process”

A new team of Una Hakika citizen journalists with coleagues from Tana FM and HCR UK in Garsen

Sentinel's Executive Director, Christopher Tuckwood said that when the Una Hakika information service was set up two years ago, his team were deeply impacted by the interethnic massacres in late 2012 and early 2013 and how rumours had contributed to the atmosphere of fear, distrust and hatred that fuelled the conflict.   

Una Hakika's expertise in gathering, verifying and countering the flow of misinformation will add a powerful dimension to Tana FM's broadcasts as together the teams seek to put an end to conflict in this often divided region.

HCR's Jon Hargreaves described the establishment of this new partnership as coming at a very strategic time, as Kenyan's prepare to go to the polls in August 2017.  "Elections in Kenya have often been associated with violence," said Jon, "and even this week we saw a bloody crackdown on protests in Nairobi, following demonstrations against the country's electoral commission. We want to do all we can to ensure that elections in Tana River County pass peacefully and that citizens of the county are fully aware of their rights and responsibilities."

Tana FM began test broadcasts from Hola, Capital of Tana River County in May 2015