FARM 98.0 FM: The vocal gateway to agricultural information

Agriculture is the main source of livelihood of 80% of the 4.5 million people inhabiting the remote communities and villages of Imo State, a rural state in south-eastern Nigeria. However, agricultural extension services which should support farming have collapsed, due to the unavailability of input materials needed to support this service. The outcome is that smallholder farmers lack access to reliable market information and advanced farming techniques, and use outdated techniques that turn out small volumes of products. 

Today thanks to the efforts of Nnaemeka C. Ikegwuonu and FARM 98.0 Radio, the farmers have a precious resource. FARM 98.0 FM designs and broadcasts daily agricultural, environmental management and market information in the local Igbo language to 250,000 small farmer listeners living in 3 remote and isolated local government areas of Imo State. 

FARM 98.0 broadcasts 10 hours a day, sharing contemporary agricultural and environmental management techniques, daily market information, advertises farm products and imparts critical business skills. Smallholder farmers use the daily broadcast programme to decide what to produce, when to produce, how to produce and for whom to produce in order to boost their yields and income.

In this interview Ikegwuonu shares how and why he decided to set up this valuable service for smallholder farmers and tells us about his passion for agriculture.

Community radio an extension to telecentre. What is the next frontier? (154)

by Antonella Cordone

John Tarawe from the E.Bario Radio, a small projects financed through the IFAD Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility, shared his experience in setting-up the first community radio in Malaysia.
His story was about a dream that everybody thought it could not become real as the government would have not given a license for a community radio for indigenous peoples in Malaysia. John and his team thought their dream could become a reality if they were able to mobilize the right people and talk to the government….. and they were right.

Today the first licence has been issued by the government to the E.Bario Radio Broadcasting and furthermore, they are now supporting the government to design their policy on community radio. Mosses Ndiyaine from the Maasai people of Tanzania shared his experience on the importance of community radio with mobile and pastoralist peoples informing on how community radios are often the only means of communications that can provide services to the community, for instance informing on which are the areas available for mobile people to move their cattle and of conflicts/problems in one particular area.

The presentation by Joan was dynamic and well attended. There were several questions and people sharing experience from other parts of the world. A shairfair is being organized by E.Bario in November in Malaysia and already connections have been established to also invite people from Africa and link-up with on-going project with Bioversity in Malaysia. We will continue telling the stories of indigenous peoples tomorrow and day after with Mosses from Tanzania.

All good things come to an end: Chronicle of last day at Agknowledge Africa Share Fair #sfaddis

I am now sitting at the penultimate session of the Agknowledge Africa Knowledge Share Fair - Focus on Farmers. I am sorry the event is coming to an end. The purpose of this share fair was to share and learn and I believe that we've achieved this goal. I hope that the fair has left a footprint in the hearts, minds and souls of the participants. 


Earlier in the day I attended the radio and telecentre focus groups. The radio session was a great example of the impact of the Share Fair. The room was packed with participants who before the share fair did not know anything about podcasting, podcasting/audio software and hardware. Three days later here they were showing us the audio files they have created, sharing tips on how to conduct an effective interview and discuss challenges of interviewing with the help of an interpreter and avoiding being lost in translation.

We closed the radio session with one of the participants saying: "YES WE CAN. I now know HOW TO."  That was such a wonderful way of finishing the session and showed the footprint of the share fair.

Often we are asked "what has been the impact of events such as share fair". The impact of these events are transformative. They change the way people work. They open your mind and remove the cobwebs in your mind and as a result you inevitably change behaviour which is transformative.

The telecentre session discussed issues of sustainabililty and how to generate local content. I think we came out of the session agreeing that we should rebapitze telecentres to "Knowledge hubs"  or "Service centres". 

On issue of sustainability, Paul offered some pragmatic advice on how to create a sustainable service centre, namely make sure:

• your services are competitive
• have a number of subsidized services so that you can keep your competitive edge
• provide a number of free services - especially services that really add value and improve the livelihoods of the smallholder producers, smallholder farmers and rural people

During the session participants mentioned that farmers are willing to pay for information and knowledge which is relevant to them. Personally, I have a problem with that, as we should consider knowledge is public global good and should be made available free of charge. But I stand to be corrected.

The group talked about how in Africa the village experts do not recognize themselves as experts and this is one of the reasons why local knowledge is  not documented and shared. We talked about how Africans should exploit and make sure to systematically use their oral culture, their tradition of drama and songs to share local content.

One of the best reflections of this session was the fact that often indigenous knowledge is not valued and challenged by experts/researchers. This made me reflect that  it seems to be human nature to underestimate one's own knowledge, perhaps this is why sharing tacit knowledge is a challenge?

We just finished the small group reflection and learning session and have successfully summarized the footprint and impact of this remarkable event in a tweet. Stay tuned and we'll be tweeting them live shortly. Follow #sfaddis