Community radio and mobiles connect Niger
The roads in Niger are poor and the distances are great, but the country’s 15 million people are easy to reach by mobiles and radio.
infoasaid’s Niger Media and Telecoms Landscape Guide helps aid agencies reach the country’s subsistence farmers and nomadic pastoralists as they brace for more acute food shortages in 2012.
Niger Media Revolution
In the 1990s state radio was the only way to reach people in the interior and rural communities had few channels of communication to send information quickly to the outside world.
This situation changed with the liberalisation of media ownership that followed the arrival of multi-party democracy.
The government’s FM radio network now competes with about twenty private commercial stations and over one hundred community radio stations are available.
Whereas the mobile phone network barely existed ten years ago, today it covers 33% of the population with 3.8 million Nigeriens subscribers in 2010.
This situation makes it easier to reach the remote rural communities that bear the brunt of cyclical droughts and food shortages with life-saving information.
Using mobile to improve food aid delivery
Mobile is changing the way agencies deliver food aid as it is now quicker for hungry villagers with malnourished children to give timely information to aid providers.
Across the globe, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) is trying to give needy families cash or credit to buy food instead of supplying them directly with sacks of grain and beans.
2 of the 4 mobile networks in Niger offer money transfer services. These enable people to receive credit on their phone and cash it in at a local paying agent.
The Irish NGO Concern has already experimented successfully with using mobile phones to distribute cash allowances to needy rural families in Niger. This point is further demonstrated in a paper outlining The Short-Term Impacts of a Mobile Cash Transfer Program
Traditional food distributions are likely to continue in Niger for the foreseeable future, but the mobile revolution is starting to change the way people receive aid as well as the way they talk about it.
Download infoasaid’s Niger Media and Telecoms Landscape Guide and please share it with people working on Niger.