The Children’s Radio Foundation

“Radio reminds people that we are together.”- Sandile Bhengu

Project

The Children’s Radio Foundation trains youth across Africa as radio reporters, giving them the tools and skills to make their voices heard. The foundation has 68 project sites across 5 countries in Africa. It has helped to train over 3,500 youth reporters, and their radio shows are listened to by 9.7 million people weekly. We supported the foundation to help create an integrated strategy for community engagement, complimenting their existing brilliant work with young voices.

With Comic Relief, we looked to provide clarity and focus on how Children’s Radio Foundation can creatively surface authentic community insight at a pace and in a way that meets the values and capacity of their organisation.

Process

 During lockdown, we facilitated a series of remote workshops and recorded calls to help facilitate an audit of their communication tools and engagement models. In order to experiment with more streamlined communication with communities, we trialled a version of our communication software, Radius, in partnership with country teams and a local evaluator in order to bring together a rich stream of audio, visual and text insight from across their communities.

Impact

The learning from this audit and technical trial informed a set of strategic recommendations to improve the depth, reach and authenticity of their community conversations.

Partners

Comic Relief