Mtaani CBO seek to use its two community radio stations to enlighten communities in Nairobi and Kajiado Counties on issues contained in the County Integrated Development plans (CIDPs), to ensure enlightened public, who engage with the devolved government units on the utilization of their resources focus on ensuring transparency and accountability. By employing the People First Impact method, we will engage with the community members, involving them in conversations and contents of the CIDPS through focus group discussions, and public forums to identify gaps that community radio journalist will address through in depth programs on Mtaani Radio and Radio Domus. This will in turn build a community that is able to ensure social accountability and engage in building structures necessary for meaningful citizen engagement.

This project, implemented by Bush Radio and funded by the Community Media Fund, will deliver municipal financial literacy skills to both reporters of community radio stations in the Western Cape, as well as their listeners. The reporters will produce content on their local municipal budgets as well as analysis of these budget, and deliver this content in an understandable format to listeners, while encouraging listener participation and feedback. We aim to have communities engaging municipalities on their budgets beyond the project, ultimately ensuring that these budgets are responsive to community needs.

In marginalized communities like the Turkana, the enthusiastic adoption of new media technologies is reshaping public discourse. Doubly, marginalized groups in the community like young women, who have been actively seeking to organize and join forces in their quest for better conditions, are actively exploring opportunities, skills and support to make their own voices heard through new media, prompting our project Giving Voice Through Citizen Journalism. Through this intriguing partnership project, we will train 20 young women and adolescent girls in media and facilitate their access to safe spaces, networks, mentorships and community stories.

The Association of Media Women in Kenya (AMWIK) is grateful to the Community Media Fund (CMF) funders Bloomberg Media Initiative Africa and Ford Foundation for the opportunity to partner in the second phase of this project and look forward to the outcomes that will emerge from the initiative. We reached 7 million people with our first CMF grant. We also have community radio journalists whose skills were enhanced tremendously and this remains an outcome their stations enjoy to date. Communities took action in response to the critical accountability, transparency and social justice stories produced by community radio journalists and citizen journalists supported by the CMF grant.

The Community Media Fund seeks to increase citizen participation in the planning for public resources in Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria. These grants will also strengthen community media which serves a critical role in promoting transparency, accountability and inclusion in making financial and economic policies.

At such a time as this, when a pandemic challenges individual and collective capacity, this initiative helps to uplift national institutions and processes. Developing and activating the capacity of community journalists to engage natural resources management will refuel the media and re-energize governance far into the post – Covid-19 era.