Baccalauréat · Série D · Anglais — 2018

Text — What the radio changed

In 2009, a community radio station began broadcasting from a two-room building in a small town of the Sahel. It had one transmitter, four volunteers and a range of about forty kilometres.

Nobody expected much. The nearest newspaper arrived once a week, when it arrived at all, and most people in the surrounding villages could not read it. Television required electricity, which few households had.

What the founders had not foreseen was the effect of broadcasting in local languages. Programmes on vaccination, on the price of cereals in the regional market, on the rights of women in inheritance, suddenly reached people who had never been reached by anything. A farmer in a village without a road could now know, before leaving home, what his sorghum was worth thirty kilometres away.

The station also began a programme in which listeners telephoned to ask questions to local officials. It was not always comfortable. Twice, the mayor refused to come. But the programme continued, and it is still broadcast today.

« We did not bring information to these villages », one of the founders says. « The information existed. We removed the wall between it and them. »