EDUCATION BROADCASTING FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: A COMMUNITY RADIO APPROACH

Abstract

With the perceived strengths of Community radios at ensuring representation and participation of the voiceless; and the significance of educational contents in social change initiative, this paper looks at the level of prominence attached to educational programs in UNIZIK campus radio and the efficacy of the latter in promoting human development in that direction. This work employs a content analysis of educational contents in UNIZIK 94.1 fm, from April 2015 to March 2016, consisting of four quarters and a sample of all the days except Sundays. Having found that the station had consistent weekly programs all through the period of the study with a total of 164 issues being reported per week, only one week program schedule was studied to represent all the other weeks within the four quarters under study. This study also found that only 41 educational programs are being broadcast by the station per week, with majority being magazine programs essentially designed for general audience consumption. The deficiency of educational contents notwithstanding, the programs cycled within developments; hardly satisfy the students’ academic needs and these programs ‘inspirational words’ and ‘Newspaper reviews comes up more than others but these Vernacular Programs, ‘Oge Ndi Igbo’, and ‘Nnoko Ndi Igbo’, also remained frequent within each week. These educational programs, come up more on Thursdays of every week and the longest lasting of all is ‘soul to soul’. - a magazine program that lasts for two hours (from 7.00pm to 9.00pm on Thursdays). Other magazine programs such as ‘Political Digest’, ‘Focus’, and ‘Issues’, though very interesting, cover a wide range of topical issues. This study therefore concludes that the representation of educational content in any community media could affect the level of importance attached to them by receivers. It is therefore recommended that Community Radios should justify its education function via representation of sufficient educational contents; and that governmental agencies, NGOs should also assist in the sponsor of such programs.