“Do you like school”?, I asked Lucy, an eight-year-old orphan in a community school near Lusaka. “Yes,” she replied with enthusiasm. When I asked why, she replied, “Because Mrs Musanda loves me.” “How do you know?” I asked. “Because of how she speaks to me”. I then asked Lucy if she knew what Mrs Musanda looked like. She described her in detail. I posed this question to Lucy’s classmates one-by-one. They all confidently told me about Mrs Musanda’s appearance, size, hairstyle and what clothing she wore.
But Mrs Musanda was the voice of the teacher on the radio. None of the students had ever seen her. Each child had a minds-eye picture of what she looked like and described her in detail. While each Mrs Musanda looked different, they all had one thing in common: her voice made a personal and heartfelt connection with each student.
It was then that I understood the profound power of radio to spark a child’s imagination and how a friendly voice could help vulnerable and at-risk children feel cared for, encouraged and supported.
In this case, Mrs Musanda was the main actor in a long-playing Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) primary school programme in Zambia called Learning at Taonga Market. It went off the national airwaves in 2015, mainly due to the cost of broadcasting fees. However, it continues to air on local language community radio stations. During its nearly 20 years of being broadcast, Taonga Market helped provide a high quality, free basic education to an estimated 800,000 children, most of whom were growing up in chronic poverty.
COVID-19 the great disruptor
When COVID-19 disrupted the education of billions of students across the globe, radio education gained renewed importance as an effective, reliable and highly personal medium for fuelling learning – one that can reach millions of students, wherever those students are. While education ministries, UN agencies and NGOs are scrambling to respond with alternative learning measures, tens of millions of children will not be reached – because of a lack of access to the Internet and other resources, including a power supply.
In East and Southern African alone, an estimated 127 million school children remained at home. In most areas in Africa a mere 22% (according to UNICEF) have internet access. In rural areas, where the majority of the population lives, only 16% have electricity.
Countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, South Sudan, Somalia, DR Congo, Sierra Leone, Malawi and South Africa have long-established traditions of radio learning and have developed curriculum-based school lessons.
With many communities being in far flung rural areas, coupled with a shortage of schools and trained teachers, as in Zambia, radio has helped to bridge the gap. And for the tens of thousands of children in Africa who live in care homes,orphanages and refugee camps radio can play a key role in providing learning opportunities. Audio learning brings supplemental benefits, as it has been shown to help students with memorisation, concentration and focus.
When schools are in session, radio education bridges additional divides, including income, age and literacy level. Radio-based schools accept grade 1 students who are well beyond the government-mandated age of seven. I’ve met many teenaged students, hungry to learn, who courageously participated in primary classes, like orphaned 18-year-old Tumaini. Tall and wearing a makeshift uniform, Tumaini sat in a grade 1 class on a tiny plastic blue chair in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, so he could learn to read and write. He told me he felt humiliated because he couldn’t read money. I’ve also met grannies in radio classrooms who never had the chance to go to school and wanted to be able to read to their grandchildren.
Radio education also provides support and instruction to teachers. In community (non-government) schools, teachers are seldom formally trained and might be literate adults who volunteer. For these teachers, radio-based teacher training builds capacity, helps with lesson plans and supports class administration.
Since our inception in 1999, Lifeline Energy has distributed more than 250,000 solar and wind-up radios and MP3 players in community and government schools and refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa. Averaging 40 or more children in each classroom, those radios and MP3 players have reached many millions of students.
Author | Kristine Pearson
Chief Executive of Lifeline Energy
Kristine Pearson is the founding Chief Executive of Lifeline Energy since 1999. She was previously an executive with a large South African banking group. Kristine is a fellow of the Schwab Foundation of the World Economic Forum; received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the African Women’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum; served 8 years on the Women’s Leadership Board of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; was named a Hero of the Environment by Time magazine and was a recipient of the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.