Week 4: About collaboration and sustainability

Collaboration for effective rural communication
#1

Hello everyone

I trust you had a lovely weekend!

This is our last week together. Let’s take advantage of the fact that we are from all across Africa and have this unique opportunity to share and learn from each other on the important topic of collaboration.

This week we are discussing how to make collaboration last.

Here are some questions to help guide the discussion:

1.Does all collaboration between radio broadcasters and stakeholders require funding? Why? Or why not?

2.How can collaboration between radio broadcasters and stakeholders be sustainable? Please provide examples of long-lasting collaboration you’ve been involved in related to radio programs.

You can also ask questions on collaboration topics that we have not touched on yet.

As always our resource people will contribute ideas and respond to your questions.

Please be reminded that those of you that contribute at least two meaningful posts each week will receive a certificate indicating they were active participants in the e-Discussion. If you have missed out on previous weeks, you can still go back and contribute between now and Friday.

Have a great week!

Busi

#2
#3

1.Does all collaboration between radio broadcasters and stakeholders require funding? Why? Or why not?
Collaboration between broadcasters and stakeholders doesn’t necessarily requires funding. There is Community Collaboration, Perhaps the most common type of stakeholder collaboration is community engagement or public participation. For any project that might impact community members, it’s in everyone’s best interests to work closely together to ensure that the project delivers the best possible outcomes.

There are many ways you might collaborate with a community and allow members of the public to participate in your project or share their thoughts. For example, you might host community meetings to share information and gather feedback for an upcoming development or major event. Or you might survey community members to see what they think about local laws or a range of other issues like agriculture best approach in the rural communities, working on a collapsed bridge, rebuilding a broken walls of a community health facility, raising awareness on a particular disease like Diptheria going on in Kafanchan, Kaduna State, Nigeria.

There is also Internal Collaboration, where taking a stakeholder engagement approach with your internal stakeholders can help you build stronger relationships, get aligned on goals, communicate better, work more efficiently, share resources, exchange ideas, and improve project outcomes. Some examples of Internal stakeholders, you might collaborate with include: Owners or directors, Management team, Colleagues and team members, Other departments and teams

2.How can collaboration between radio broadcasters and stakeholders be sustainable? Please provide examples of long-lasting collaboration you’ve been involved in related to radio programs.

Collaborating with stakeholders can help to support sustainability. For example, in sustainable neighborhood projects (with a variety of stakeholders and competing interests), collaboration can help to bring in more perspectives (supporting long-term performance) and find common ground.
In our program tagged “Me and My Community” where issues reflecting community development and challenges are discussed have overtime brought in government officials, agencies, local Community authority, members of the communities mostly affected in terms of water has alerted the government on the seriousness of providing water for the people. To this there was adequate communication where the radio station midwifed the idea of bringing the issue of water to the public knowledge and the agency now always reached out to the station for issues relating to community development without funding as it were.

The joy of every broadcasting organization is that whatever community issues that is brought to public glare gets an attention it brings fulfilment and greater recognition and participation by the public in order to look into other challenges which in this sense has built trust, confidence and ensured sustainability.

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#4

Hello everyone

We are halfway through Week 4!

If you have not yet contributed this week, we are waiting for you.

Some people believe collaboration does not necessarily need money while others are thinking of the needs of the radio station and that collaboration needs to have funding to take care of those needs.

I read an article on collaboration or paid relationship?The writer was actually talking about whether people get into collaboration for free work. Some may think like that but then again this statement caught my eye:

“If people got together more and stopped thinking about money and started to create content to reach their collaborative audience , much more paid work would come their way”.

This made a lot of sense to me. As you collaborate, you produce informative content and reach larger audiences, that can assist your marketing team to get sponsorship for the programs you are collaborating on and that will sustain the collaboration you have.

Any thoughts on this?

#5

Hello @Donjosh

Thank you for your contribution. Indeed, we can collaborate without the involvement of money. This may not be easy for all, as participants point out on WhatsApp, most community radio stations use volunteers and are in need of money, their decision to base collaboration on monetary gain is a result of their needs. They do not think in terms of seasons, there is a planting season and a harvesting season. You plant a seed today (collaborate with stakeholders without involving money), you produce great programs that attract a lot of listeners and tomorrow when you go out looking for sponsorship, you will not struggle selling a well packaged program that has a huge following.

#6

Absolutely Ma’am!
We are a Community Radio Station and all of us the staff are volunteers.
We understand the money factor in a collaboration but the much needed collaboration is with the community stakeholders, which is the first driving force to keep the station going on.
I remember an incident where i visited a group of Widows and encourage them to maximize the opportunity of listening to radio and contributing. We collaborated with some farmers amongst the widows, conducted interviews, they shared their stories and that formed part of the program. They were happy hearing their voices and the contributions they made was an incredible part of the program.
We were having a meeting at the station with the volunteers, some Widows cooked food, brought to us groundnut, yam, garden eggs and one of them brought hundred naira to us as her contribution.
I know, collaboration varies in terms of contents and the organisations, whichever, for a radio station to key into any collaboration, it must have a win-win target goals.

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#7

To a larger extent, collaboration does not require funding this is because forex ample to community collaborations, which is our most common type of collaboration in our country where we use a lot of it, you find that the citizens are earl waiting for the media teams and thus no investing . this makes collaboration very cheap