And meet and talk we did. Their office in in a suburb of the city, in a converted house, shared with WUSC. The folks at Farm Radio do much of the work for the region (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia) in this one place, and have over 6,000 stations to which they send scripts of radio broadcasts. Pretty impressive! Part of the time there was a question and answer with the main people of the organization, which was very interesting (so much so that it went well past the time they had allotted). We had tea and also lunch there, eating well on locally-sourced and cooked food.
Another part of the compound that they are in, is what they call "The Hangar". I'm not too sure where the name comes from. But it is a converted garage, which has been turned into a hive for innovation of the technology involved with running radio broadcasts. The have interactive broadcasts, advertised beforehand, where a person can phone in a few days before the show, get an automated response which asks them to do a survey. This then lets them know what about a particular topic interests the farmers involved, and they can adjust the actual program to those topics. And while the show is on (if it is live), they will accept calls on-air, and can even have three or four-way conversations with the host, an expert, and up to two callers at the same time. Pretty amazing, and something which has not been possible until they worked on it. Now the local stations can buy a "Vox-Box" for around $300 and have all the technology needed in a turnkey instrument. As well, their software for the Vox-Box as well as for the show allows them to track in real time where their callers are, who they are, and call-back numbers; and then graph it. And...when the show is over, it is recorded onto an SD card and sent out to various radio stations who are free to re-play it as they wish; and to community listening groups who will gather around a radio and listen to it on their radio. All unimaginable being able to do even three years ago.
On top of all this, they also distribute weekly to the same 6,000 contacts a bulletin of news topics and research information about farming.
So they are busy people.
But they wanted to show us in the field what was happening. The shows are actually done by local stations, not by FRI. One of these stations is a privately-owned one in Arusha itself—Radio Mambo-Jambo, 92.9 FM—and we went to see it.
We talked to Jho, the manager, watched a broadcast, and recorded a message of our own (my voice may now be used as a promo for the station). This station reached a wide audience in the northern part of Tanzania, and many of these are farmers. They do about an hour a week of programming for farmers at this time, but would like to expand and do more, so will be working further with FRI.
That was the educational part of the day. Following this, we went to a money exchange to get some Tanzanian cash, then downtown to buy some sim cards. This latter took some time, and was foreign enough to me (at least) that I got cheated, I think. Fortunately, cell service in this country is cheap, so I paid a grand total of about $25 for better coverage than I get in Canada.
(A telling side-story: in the centre of the Arusha Downtown is the Clock Tower, said to be the place half-way between Cairo and Johannesburg. This is a simple, roughly two-story tower with four clock faces. The clock faces all have "Coca-Cola" written on them: telling!)
And the evening was spent at a nyama choma dinner (basically, a barbecue) in town. Then to bed.
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Location:Moivaro Lodge, Tanzania
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