New project‚ new team‚ new exciting challenges ahead

I have been pretty busy over the last 6 weeks kick-starting a new and definitely unique project in Central African Republic (CAR). “Integrating Local Media and ICTs into Humanitarian Response in CAR” is a revolutionary project like any other I have seen in my 35 years as reporter, trainer and humanitarian worker.

We have managed to hire a very qualified Humanitarian and Media Liaison Officer, Raimondo Chiari who has an impressive record with UNOCHA in Colombia, the ICRC in Darfur, the United Nations Mission in Cote d’Ivoire and IOM in Jordan.

Our M&;E team is equally impressive with Patrick Vinck and a local counterpart with extensive experience working with international organizations in CAR (see this video about his previous research). Patrick is researcher and lecturer with expertise in the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods in program evaluation and the study of complex international issues such as post-conflict transition, human rights, poverty reduction, food security, and rural development, and has worked extensively in CAR before (checkwww.peacebuildingdata.org/car/map).

We are also exploring with him one of his projects,www.kobotoolbox.org, that provides an integrated suite of applications for handheld digital data collection. We are very interested in this since the audience research work we started doing in Haiti after the earthquake and more recently in Dadaab (September 2011), as part of a communication needs assessment.

The main players
But the most exciting component of this project are the 15 local radio stations and all the reporters and producers who work there and of course, our main partner, the Association of Journalists for Human Rights, that acts as central point for information and news sharing and communication coordination center here in Bangui.

Our office-residence is ready and all the equipment (i.e. laptops, mobile phones, modems…) pretty much procured. I have chosen to run our three current programs in CAR out of the same office for better coordination and to try to connect activities and create synergies among our different existing programs, when possible.

Most activities for the HIF project will be initially piloted in Obo, in the southeast of this immense country -as big as France but with only 4 million people! In these areas, the humanitarian needs are large and urgent due to almost 3 decades of insecurity, conflict, and regular attacks from the Lord Resistance Army (LRA), that have led the region, and the country, along with other factors like corruption or lack of infrastructure, just to name a few, into a situation of arrested development.

Internews’ HIF funded project is most needed in this region and throughout the country: bringing together the information from the grass roots and connecting it with humanitarian interventions. We have been working in CAR for the last 2 years very close with community radios and local correspondents in areas where there is literally no radio coverage. And, as mentioned, we have set up a coordination center for the community radios with the Association of Journalists for Human Rights that provides and produces stories for all community radios in CAR and the humanitarian community (see their daily rundowns in their website here).

Our most immediate steps will be to conduct a needs assessment among the humanitarian organizations and community radios –that will follow a training for radio stations on the use new technologies, including SMS gateways and the launch of an Ushahidi platform linked to this project.

A bit of our history in CAR
Internews started operations in CAR almost 2 years ago as a sub grant of Mercy Corps. This program, on human rights, closed in May 2011. During that project Internews built a strong relationship with humanitarian agencies, especially UNOCHA. Also, it started the Network for Community Radios, that brought together the 15 local radio stations in the country, and handed it over to our great local partner, the Association of Journalists for Human Rights, that was formed during one of our journalism trainings.

Despite the fact that we had to temporarily stop operations due to lack of funding, the Association managed to brilliantly continue its activities and partly because of that, we have managed to find new sources of funding to continue supporting local media and humanitarian communications in CAR.

From September 2011, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is supporting the Association, the Network of 15 community radios, the production of an e-newsletter and a SMS system. More recently USAID started supporting a Community Radio Correspondents Network that will focus on providing eastern CAR residents with information benefitting their safety and economic livelihoods.

And now, with support from the HIF we, agencies working in CAR, have a new opportunity to pilot new ways to provide more and new services to the main recipients of humanitarian and development work, local communities.

Jeroen Corduwener
Project Director
Internews CAR and Cote d'Ivoire
[email protected]