"What makes me happy is when there is no sickness at home."
Prettygirl,
11 years old

"When I heard people saying, like perhaps when we were playing, they would say the dead one is watching her children and then I would cry. When they spoke about her it felt as if I could see her very close to me."
Lindokuhle, 11 years old

This collaborative child-participatory radio project between the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, Zisize Educational Trust and Okhayeni Primary School in rural northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, is designed to contribute to developing public awareness and appropriate responses to children in the context of poverty and the HIV epidemic. By providing children themselves with the opportunity to depict their lives, insights and concerns through the production of radio programmes, the project aims both to provide children with useful life skills as well as to enable their stories and interests to reach a large audience.

Children aged between nine and 14 years old are facilitated in ongoing child-participatory processes which result in the production of personal radio-diary programmes, as well as programmes which document and explore local issues of their choice. Programmes are aired by broadcast partner Maputaland Community Radio, as well as by other interested radio stations.

The children have named themselves Abaqophi basOkhayeni Abaqinile – the Strong Recorders from Okhayeni.   

The rural expanse of Ingwavuma, in the far north-eastern corner of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, stretches across the Lebombo mountains and the Pongola river flood plain, sharing its borders with south-eastern Swaziland and southern Mozambique. Homesteads of the roughly 180,000-strong population are built mostly from wattle and daub, some of home-cast cement blocks, and are scattered across the countryside among aloes, thorn trees and mealie crops which over the last few years have struggled to survive through summer droughts. Homes near the main roads increasingly have access to electricity, but the vast majority are without. More than 85% of households rely on candles for lighting, and 62% of households in the district report having no access to any form of sanitation facility. Few have water piped to their yards, and most residents collect water from erratically-operating public water pumps and the nearby river.

Here children grow up amidst extensive poverty, summer-time malaria risk, a legacy of under-resourced or absent service provision, and a burgeoning HIV epidemic. In the 2001 South African Census, 47% of households in the district reported having no form of cash income, and 75% of adult residents were recorded as economically inactive. Although no HIV-prevalence statistics are available for the district, doctors in the area believe the 2005 provincial antenatal HIV figure of 3% to be a plausible local estimate. Death is widespread, and funerals have become a repeated weekend activity.

It is against this backdrop that the collaborating organisations established the Abaqophi basOkhayeni Abaqinile/Okhayeni Strong Recorders project in 2005.

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Article 13 (1) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states:
"The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice."

Despite the provisions for children's right to freedom of expression (Articles 12 and 13) in the UNCRC, children’s participation and communication regarding issues that affect their own lives continues to be a rare privilege for many children in the world, including children growing up in contemporary Ingwavuma. Here children are characteristically afforded few opportunities to make their voices heard, to ask questions, and to articulate their needs and struggles. The extraordinary silences in this community about the presence of an HIV epidemic that wreaks havoc in both children and adults’ lives make the importance of providing children with opportunities to access information and voice their experiences and needs all the more critical. Proper understanding of children’s needs, a grasp of the ways in which children experience and make sense of the world around them, insight into children’s priorities in a context of struggle – these are all key to responding to the impacts of the epidemic on children's lives.

In the context of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, participation entails the act of encouraging and enabling children to make their views known on the issues that affect them. Providing children with opportunities to produce their own media is one of the most powerful ways in which to give effect to this right.

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In addition, child-participatory media work has the potential to contribute to the realisation of a number of children’s other rights. Child-participatory media processes – if appropriately designed – can have a range of positive repercussions. These are demonstrated by the experiences of the project to date.

They include, among others:

Participating children are facilitated through a series of processes, held during weekly after-school workshops. Over a period of six months, each new group of children write and illustrate books about their own lives. The process enables the children to develop oral history skills, and to explore personal narratives from which they could draw when making their radio programmes. They subsequently participate in a radio-diary training workshop in which they learn about interviewing, sound, technical radio production skills (including the use of recording equipment and the elements of producing radio programmes) and record their personal radio narratives.

Once radio-diary production is complete, children receive additional participatory training to expand and consolidate their radio skills – including in topic identification, interviewing techniques, ‘storyboarding’, creative programme production techniques, introduction to editing, and facilitation. These children continue to produce programmes on local issues that interest or concern them; first by identifying an issue they all agree is important to explore, planning who should be interviewed, what questions to ask, what other items might make the programme more engaging (this sometimes means composing poems and songs), who should do what, and finally collaboratively scripting and narrating the programme for broadcast.

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The project has to date been grateful for the financial support of IBIS and the United Nations Association for the United States of America HERO project (2005); the Open Society Foundation (2005-2007); Stop AIDS Now (2006) and the Media Development and Diversity Agency (2007-2009).

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