The Trust is supporting the Children’s Radio Foundation, which trains children to create and broadcast radio in South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Liberia and DRC.
Learning the journalistic skills of interviewing, researching, and producing a radio show is empowering for the children, building up confidence and communication skills. It also creates dialogues in communities about local realities. Some problems are made intractable by stigma, and children’s radio voices are often an effective way to overcome such social barriers.
Radio production is relatively easy to learn, inexpensive and has more reach than other media in many isolated places.
The Trust is funding a pilot project on adolescent mental health at the School Radio Network in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, the largest and fastest growing township in South Africa. Common mental disorders are prevalent, made worse by the legacy of Apartheid, HIV, poverty and violence, and they in turn make all these problems worse. Creating dialogue among school children, who are also dealing with all the complications of adolescence, is an important step towards a fruitful and open culture in which such difficult problems can be tackled.
