{"id":4454,"date":"2021-02-14T18:24:01","date_gmt":"2021-02-14T18:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/?p=4454"},"modified":"2021-02-14T17:07:14","modified_gmt":"2021-02-14T17:07:14","slug":"tuning-africa-in-to-wireless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless","title":{"rendered":"Tuning Africa in to wireless"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press<\/a> – South-Africa<\/a>. <\/strong><\/span>On the heels of World Radio Day on Saturday, Kristine Pearson, the founding chief executive of Lifeline Energy, an organisation which distributes wind-up radios to assist with education around Africa, talks to Sue Barkly about her work and her latest dream \u2013 to \u201ccreate a Radio Voice Bank, like YouTube, but for radio\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

If you are a woman living in a rural area, access to information to make major life decisions can be challenging.<\/p>\n

This is what sparked an innovation in radio technology and changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people across Africa.<\/p>\n

It all started more than two decades ago, when Capetonian Pearson took a sabbatical from her high-powered job in the South African banking sector and travelled around rural Mozambique.<\/p>\n

She had been asked to set up a charity in Africa and so, equipped with a few of the recently-invented wind-up radios and using an interpreter, she spent time speaking to different groups of rural women.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I asked what they wanted to learn about, there were a lot of questions about family, maternal health and HIV and Aids. It was post-conflict Mozambique, so these desperately poor women also wanted to talk about agriculture and farming,\u201d Pearson said.<\/p>\n

A long-time advocate of women\u2019s rights, Pearson realised that women in rural settings were \u201cmaking major life decisions by guessing or by asking somebody else\u201d, and she thought: \u201cif we could get information to them they could make better choices\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI also realised that millions of dollars were spent on radio programming for people who had no way of listening to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

California-born Pearson had already travelled to many African countries and had long before, made South Africa her home, but the trip to Mozambique changed her life.<\/p>\n

On a visit to Rwanda in 1999, she saw that our \u201cbig black radios with a crank\u201d, which had been given to a charity in Kigali, were being used in child-headed households.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose radios only lasted 30 minutes and the children would stay up all night, winding them up, listening and then winding them up again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to create a brand new radio specifically for children living on their own and for distance education.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest is history: Pearson got funding to develop this new radio, called the Lifeline radio \u2013 the first created solely for the humanitarian sector \u2013 and launched it in 2003.<\/p>\n

Lifeline Energy is a non-profit social enterprise that designs, manufactures and distributes solar and wind-up media players and radios for classroom and groups listening in low-resource settings.<\/p>\n

Since 1999, Lifeline Energy has distributed more than 685 000 wind-up and solar-powered radios and media players, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, reaching many millions of listeners.<\/p>\n

The organisation has worked across Africa, integrating power-independent MP3 players and radios into communication initiatives in health, agriculture, education, climate change and complex emergencies.<\/p>\n

In Niger, she distributed wind-up radios to remote villages in the Sahara Desert, and took part in a \u201cguns for radios\u201d project. In Kenya, the organisation distributed solar and wind-up radios and lights and helped rural women understand their legal rights. In Tanzania, an 18-year-old orphan sat in a Grade 1 radio school class to learn to read and write.<\/p>\n

According to Pearson, the Covid-19 pandemic has again put the spotlight on the role of radio in education for billions of students globally.<\/p>\n

Ever the innovator, Pearson \u2013 a globally recognised social entrepreneur, a Fellow of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship of the World Economic Forum, as well as a member of Catalyst 2030, a global movement of social entrepreneurs and social innovators who share the goal of creating innovative approaches to reach the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 \u2013 spoke about her latest vision: a concept called Radio Voice Bank.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there can be a place \u2013 like YouTube is for video \u2013 where local language content can be stored and accessed on demand, then learning opportunities for anybody on a variety of subjects can be made possible where they didn\u2019t have the opportunity before.\u201d<\/p>\n

The initiative is already at the stage of strategically developing content and distribution partnerships to leverage existing radio content and increase its reach.<\/p>\n

\u201cRadio Voice Bank will be the world\u2019s first open source, searchable library of curated audio content for African listeners; a podcasting platform that will enable people to easily search, download and listen to all types of news, factual and drama programmes, via data and internet-enabled devices when they choose,\u201d Pearson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a game-changer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weekend Argus<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – South-Africa. On the heels of World Radio Day on Saturday, Kristine Pearson, the founding chief executive of Lifeline Energy, an organisation which distributes wind-up radios to assist with education around Africa, talks to Sue Barkly about her work and her latest dream \u2013 to \u201ccreate a Radio Voice Bank, like YouTube, but for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":4453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,8],"tags":[274,315,275],"class_list":["post-4454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-files","category-homepage-english","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-south-africa","tag-south-africa-2"],"yoast_head":"\nTuning Africa in to wireless - South Africa<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On the heels of World Radio Day on Saturday, Kristine Pearson, the founding chief executive of Lifeline Energy, an or ...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tuning Africa in to wireless\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On the heels of World Radio Day on Saturday, Kristine Pearson, the founding chief executive of Lifeline Energy, an or ...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"South Africa\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/AfricaPressTunisiaa\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-02-14T18:24:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/sites\/31\/2021\/02\/img-602958aaa6493.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"720\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"404\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"cfeditoren\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/#\/schema\/person\/068c7ab4e9634ae78ec5d54ec46598bb\"},\"headline\":\"Tuning Africa in to wireless\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-02-14T18:24:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless\"},\"wordCount\":745,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/sites\/31\/2021\/02\/img-602958aaa6493.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Africa Press\",\"Africa Press-South-Africa\",\"South-Africa\"],\"articleSection\":[\"all news\",\"files\",\"homepage-english\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/tuning-africa-in-to-wireless\",\"name\":\"Tuning Africa in to wireless - 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