Community Radio

Three decades have passed since the community radio had been identified as a powerful media for development. Number of community radios cropped up and unable to prove their existence any longer. Many allegations have been leveled against the existing radio channels. Lack of policy at the government level, dependency on government radio stations, lack of new models,  awareness, understanding, learning, researching ,  quality, lack of plans for the sustainability and so on are among them. Even though, it is true enough we can’t accept it totally. We can’t deny the facts that there are ample of opportunities before us to go forward in developing the society, with the help of community radio in this era of ICT.

Community radio plays a major role in the sectors of education, arts, culture, health, politics, information technology, gender, skill development, peace building, minority development and rural development. Community radio is the most powerful tool by which pluralism, diversity, engagement, women development, child empowerment, agricultural establishment; good governance including e-governance, democracy and so on can be promoted.

Internet is the best option and alternative for Sri Lanka. Lack of accessibility and ICT literacy is never going to be a challenge if the proper communication methodology is used. Existing ICT tools can easily be utilized in order to localize the content and making it accessible to the people by new communication models. Sri Lanka has got reasonable amount of ICT infrastructure and rural access centers.  Utilizing these facilities the community radio culture via internet can be encouraged while demanding the government to issue licenses for community radios.

Strategies

• Encouraging the community to raise their voice and to realize the need of their own radio.
• Introduce internet community radios throughout the country and create links with the people.
• Linking the Rural access points with all the regional radio stations.
• Providing guidance and consultancy to improve the quality of existing community radios.
• Introducing new models in accordance to the need assessment to connect people with radio.
• Encouraging new initiatives in the field of community radio and create a general platform to build the capacities of the human resource.
• Give room for research on community radio in media studies.
• Linking the schools, Social service organizations, youth development centre’s, rural development organizations, higher studies Institutes with the community radio.

Citizen Journalism

The Citizen Journalism in Sri Lanka has not yet been publicized or localized. Even though some attempts were made in city level, they failed to highlight the life struggle of rural society. Sri Lanka is moving fast towards the era of IT Villages. The internet connectivity and the usage of mobile phones are scaling up. Network readiness index (NRI Index) had shown an unprecedented growth of use of ICT tools and preparedness in Sri Lanka. This background shows that there are enough bases to build up citizen journalism in broad level and have connected with the community at every level. It should be noted that although the social need for Citizen Journalism was felt for years. The opportunity for an easy start for was not yet been made.

Particularly the daily sufferings and the problems of the rural, marginalized, disadvantaged, and estate minorities were not fully considered by the government and the main stream media. The plight of the war affected people who are in camps is also the same. At this background, the Sri Lanka Development Journalist forum is ready to undertake the responsibility of building up a Citizen Journalism culture and to bring citizen voices to the light.

Sri Lanka Development Journalist Forum has realized the need of utilizing all the possible tools where national level movement for Citizen Journalism can be created. It’s hope to collaborate with all the stakeholders those who are closely working on citizen journalism.

Strategies

• Maximum utilization of the available IT facilities, setting up an island wide network through village level well citizen journalism activist.
• Establishing citizen journalism bases in provincial and district level in the native languages and construct separate web sites for them.
• Creating an island wide awareness programme accommodating universities, researchers and public.
• Promoting training on citizen journalism and designing technical applications to bring the citizen journalism closer to the people.

Researches and Training

Research and training are the back bone of the media study and industry. Most of the researches that had been done is Sri Lanka touches the areas of media disciplines, media ethics, reporting, and general trend of media, media freedom, and development communication and so on. These theoretical studies and are not sufficient enough to enhance the media as an educational model and learning the media as an empowering tool. Yet, there is a great demand for the researches which shows the connections between media and community.

Sri Lankan media both mainstream and community based are on a competition at the common commercial market and lack the professionalism in many areas. As far as Tamil media is concern, there is a big gap in the quality of the production and the delivering strategies when comparing to Sinhala media. Most of the Tamil media has almost lost the national touch and identity and fadeed away by the influence of South Indian media. There is a big challenge to build up a media with Sri Lankan identity. On the other hand, Sinhala media has many rooms to be concentrated for the further improvement. Capacity development from the top to bottom for the media institutions is a timely need. Areas such as concept developing, adopting the technology, cutting edge productions methods, media management, participatory rural productions, news and news room management, online journalism, developmental communications are to be concentrated in the training programmes of SDJF. Meantime, SDJf has its own strategy to cater the school based media activities with the intention of creating a strong learning environment.

Strategies

• Ensure the research and training reach the society again.
• Providing subsidies for the research and creating a national level platform to localize them.
• Conducting need assessments and continues training.
• Training should fulfill the needs of post conflict era and should lead the journalist to facilitate the community towards empowerment.
• Promoting the field researches that cater people.
• School based trainings and workshops

Broadcasting and Development

Broadcasting is a powerful tool of social transformations and changes. It is an enabling factor that can easily influence, manipulate and educate the community and shape the attitude, behavioral pattern and skills of the people. With the speediest growth of ICT, radio has become a close neighbor to the rural community. This is the ideal era in Sri Lanka to use the radio in order to uplift the standards of the life of whole disadvantaged community and lead them toward long term development. Under this category, SDJF will produce its radio and television programme under its supervision and by using its suitable local resources. SDJf will collaborate with local media outlets and mainstream media institutions.

Strategies

• Conducting need assessment based on regional social requirements and designing radio programme in different models to cater the particular society.
• Identifying and encouraging grassroots production that could reflect the development needs of the society.
• Producing radio dramas, comprehensive documents, magazine programmes, story programmes aiming at different vulnerable community and their empowerment.

Monitoring & Evaluation

The Monitoring and Evaluation (M & E) Team of SDJF is a unique forum that brings the professional experts from various M&E streams to assure the effectiveness of SDJF deliverables. In addition, we extend our specialism for the development initiatives taking place outside the SDJF. The Advisory Panel and the Board of Directors appoint all the consultants of the SDJF M & E Team, after deeply evaluating their professionalism and expertism.

Our goal is to increase the effectiveness of the development initiatives that are carried out by SDJF and other community development organizations. SDJF always believes that the independent M&E mechanism is a core requirement for the success of all development actions. Our M& E specialists are multiple talented and expertise in diverse sectors which will help us to provide you an outstanding service with the sense of relevance and professionalism.

We are committed to work with development agencies and community based organizations to meet their M & E requirements. SDJF build partnerships with clients to forge long-term successful relationships. We always help them to improve their performance ― by establishing evidence-based policy-making and budget decision-making, evidence-based management, and evidence-based accountability through our M&E service.