What will be different when the next disaster hits Haiti?
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti gave rise to several communications initiatives that helped the local population to deal with the catastrophe and seek assistance from aid agencies.
To find out how effective two-way communication could mitigate the impact of future disasters in this earthquake and hurricane-prone country, see infoasaid’s new Haiti Media and Telecoms Landscape Guide.
Radio and mobile telephony are still the most effective channels for reaching people quickly in this poor Caribbean nation of nine million people.
Nearly every adult has a mobile phone and 19 out of 20 Haitians listen to the radio.
But only a third of the population has access to television and very few Haitians ever see a newspaper.
The internet is only within reach of a small, educated and relatively affluent minority of town dwellers.
The infoasaid guide to Haiti contains a comprehensive list of the country’s 375 radio stations. It shows who is on air in each province and town.
The guide also profiles the largest and most popular radio and TV networks and gives contact details for them.
Dominating the ratings are Caraïbes FM and Radio Ginen, two popular radio stations in the capital Port –au-Prince, whose programmes are widely relayed round the entire country.
However, survey evidence indicates that outside the capital people often prefer to tune in to local FM stations for news about developments that affect their lives directly.
Dealing with a plethora of small stations in isolated towns and villages is a logistical nightmare for aid agencies.
However, steady consolidation within Haiti’s crowded media sector could soon lead to the emergence of larger groups of popular radio stations that combine a core schedule of nationally networked programming with local inputs.
When it comes to mobile communications, the dominant network operator in Haiti is Digicel. Having swallowed its nearest rival Voila in March 2012, Digicel now has a massive 80% share of the local market.
The media in Haiti is very free, largely due to an absence of government regulation.
This has led to an overcrowding of the air waves by many small radio and TV stations that are unlikely to survive in the long term.
Meagre resources and low pay mean that standards of professionalism in the media are generally quite low and corruption is rife.
Copyrights are ignored. Many small provincial radio stations pick up and rebroadcast programmes from the larger more professional stations in Port-au-Prince without authorisation.
And most TV stations broadcast a steady diet of programmes pirated from foreign satellite channels.
Aid agencies can usually persuade stations to broadcast whatever messages or programming they wish to put on air – so long as they pay for the privilege.