How Community Radio Is Giving Rural Women The Voice They Never Had

Women’s access to and participation in the media has always remained a big question, especially in rural areas. But community radio is empowering rural women, as broadcasters and as listeners.

As I walked down the narrow road in a village in the Butwal region of Nepal, I looked around and all I could see were mud houses and women trying to finish one or the other tasks. It was not a new sight for me. It is a common sight in every nook and corner of India. And there I was, standing in the middle of the kuchcha road trying to ask women their experiences with Radio Mukti, a Community Radio station for women by women.

I recalled the day I was in a village in Orchha in the Bundelkhand region, same situation, same huts, different women, similar circumstances. This is a story made up of two stories; two levels where I found women participating in community radio (a local radio station, low power, medium reach, run mostly by a NGO or educational institute) in different capacities, struggling to find a space with limited prospects and unlimited challenges to face.

She was well aware of the struggles that were being faced at the local level. The community radio, she describes, “…came up as a ray of hope, for I wanted to do something and this was just the right platform.” When she came to work at the station, the community people taunted her for moving out of her house and going to work with men. The fact that she had no mother and she had the responsibility of brothers and sisters on her made her life tougher.

When she came to work at the station, the community people taunted her for moving out of her house and going to work with men.

She describes her daily routine thus: “I get up, cook for everyone, clean the house and then get out to work at the station. Earlier, no one valued what I was doing but when they heard my voice on the radio and saw me solving community problems, they started valuing my work. At home, I am the one bringing bread and outside, I am now recognized and respected. I struggled initially with technology and fieldwork but my passion made me persistent. The struggle in the past four years has been hard, but worth it. I feel confident and there is nothing that I am scared of now.”

As a community broadcaster, the Community Radio not only shaped her personality but her connection to the community people brought those grassroots issues to the table.

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She is not just a story. She represents the story of many women I have met working in similar capacities at various radio stations, in India and in Nepal. The fact that women from different communities and villages are being represented in the media, their issues brought out, speaks for itself.  The names are varied, but the stories of women working in community radio have been similar.

The second story is a story of women at the listener level. My field visits tell me similar stories. I meet women in villages and slowly gather them for a discussion. In one of the visits in Gujarat, I can see how difficult it is for women to multi-task at home, in the farms, trying to accomplish any task left to their disposal. For me the challenge with women’s participation in media has always been ownership and access in homes to the technologies and access to mediums outside to take a stand and be a leader.

Women have always been the deprived gender. Even in the field of Media, the access and participation of women has been extremely limited. In the area of Community Radio, the issues of reach and ownership with respect to women have been challenged as it operates in the vicinity and movement is not a big question. While policies promote involvement of women in Community Radio, the reality is that it’s not as simple as it looks. Breaking the patriarchal shackles and stepping out of the mental walls is a task, which needs a lot of support and encouragement from a social perspective.

Breaking the patriarchal shackles and stepping out of the mental walls is a task, which needs a lot of support and encouragement from a social perspective.

Acting as a major information channel for women, a Community Radio station exists in their vicinity, is an immediate source of information, knowledge and at many instances hastens behavior change. It is interesting how every station that I have visited in India and Nepal includes at least one such woman broadcaster who has broken the shackles of the house, kept aside her challenges of literacy, has fought against all the barriers and has come out as a role model for women in the community.

She is the one who has moved beyond the unmarked yet known boundaries of the community territories, where she was once not even allowed to step out of the house. It’s an amazing sight – how technology has done what a lot of policies failed to do: include women.

With both men and women being keenly involved, I have always seen that the involvement of women has been beyond music and farming. They are the ones concerned about not just their children and the health of the house but are equally bothered about the rates of the vegetables they have grown, how to take care of animals, old age, health as well as issues of knowing their rights.

As a woman listener from one of the stations I visited remarked, “For us, the station is like the local activist who is not only giving us information and making us aware, but is also acting as a problem solver. Any issue we have, we call them and they give us information.. Sometimes, if we can’t go to the station, they come down and record our opinions and broadcast them…it’s empowering just listening to ourselves on the radio.”

For many who can’t read or write, or even understand any other language, the fact that the programmes a CR airs are made in their native language, by women like them, on issues that belong to them makes the station the sole source of information. One of the women from a station in rural Nepal once told me, “We don’t know what our rights are. Before the station came we did whatever was told to us, now we are trying to fight against wrong, we want to stand for ourselves and our children.” A community radio need not be all women, yet it reaches more women as they are the ones with access issues, to any form of technology, to any form of information.

Quoting Arundhati Roy, “There is no such thing as ‘voiceless’. There are only the ones deliberately silenced or preferably unheard”. I am a strong believer that through Community Radio as a medium of the masses in real, the idea of making the unheard come out and voice out their opinions is slowly coming to reality, especially for women.

(These stories are a part of a Doctoral Research in Process by the writer. For more information on Community radio and participation of women, please feel free to contact the writer.) 

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