Radio for a Profitable and Sustainable Agriculture
A website for Farmers, written by Farmers, financed by Farmers' Friends
An initiative designed to tackle one of Africa's most daunting crises...Farming.
A significant portion of Zambia's population survive on subsistence farming. Yet appropriate knowledge to improve their yields (and to farm in a more sustainable way, that helps preserve the natural resources) is difficult to come by. Radio has considerable reach in these areas and with improved connectivity many of these communities have the use of the Internet. So they can use this website to gain knowledge on sustainable farming methods.
Radio and the Internet can share knowledge and help develop a better Africa for all.
THIS WEBSITE SERVES FOUR PURPOSES
RAISE FUNDS
We depend a great deal on local Community Radio Stations to transmit weekly radio programs aimed at the Small Scale Farmers. These stations require $20/week to help them cover costs, so about $1000 a year. We currently use about 18 stations but would need a great deal more to cover all the districts within Zambia. Another cost would be to pay translators to produce copies of the many articles available on this site in different languages.
INFORMATION
The second reason for this website is to provide a library of links that should be useful to any Small Scale Farmers (particularly from Southern Africa).
There is so much information (and misinformation) on the Internet that it is difficult for a Small Scale Farmer to find relevant information without wasting a lot of costly data. Many of the links on this site are to outside sources but most of them are to files that have been written specifically to provide appropriate information in an accessible format.
RADIO
The third reason is to give the Small Scale Farmers a list of the
Radio Stations broadcasting the programs, on what frequency and at what times. Therefore if a listener is unable to hear the program she can check with that station, or, if necessary, report back to me, should the listener suspect the station is not broadcasting the programs. Sadly, we have had quite a high incidence of stations accepting our sponsorship money and then not actually broadcasting the programs. This public scrutiny is therefore a necessary precaution to safeguard the donated money.
LEADING BY EXAMPLE
Transparency and trust
The final reason for this website is that it will post a bimonthly
statement of Income and Expenditure to confirm that ALL the money that is received from donors will be made available to the various radio stations (less any banking fees and other charges that need to be paid, for this non-profit to remain compliant with the various Zambian laws). This is a very small (almost one man band) non-profit so that it is easy for us to use most of the donated money for the purpose for which it is intended. We appreciate that it is perfectly reasonable for the larger NGOs to spend some of their money on overheads and salaried staff, however, we DO believe that, if any institution is receiving donated money, they ought to be obliged to be 100% transparent about where that money is spent. We hope that, by setting this as an example, we will persuade all the millions of other NGOs to follow our lead. Even more importantly we hope that it will set an example to be followed by ALL government institutions and utilities: They are ALL public institutions and so should be 100% transparent about how they spend our money.
