Media Access

About the author: David Ker has worked for more than a decade in Mozambique on the Nyungwe project which has included language analysis and description, and literature production including Bible translation. Find out more about his various online projects here.

What is media access?

I use this term to refer to all the activities related to making information accessible in appropriate media. In my thinking there is a big difference between “available” and “accessible.” For example, in Mozambique, government agencies have a huge number of resources available for literacy and development, but they are for the most part not accessible. There might be books and journals that are out of print or kept in an obscure archive. Or they might be printed but prohibitively expensive. Biblical materials are frequently inaccessible as well. Bibles are available in many of the largest languages of Mozambique but Bibles are scarce and expensive. And of course a final obstacle is the literacy rate which is conservatively 50% and which means that even if a person has a book they can’t read it with any profit.

More than books

So, I see media access as a crucial obstacle for development. I say media rather than literacy since information is being utilized in many media besides print. For starters, there is radio which is the most important media in Africa. Even in one of the least developed countries like Mozambique, there is almost universal availability of radio programming and the radios to access it. Another medium for development is TV. A TV is probably the most coveted personal possession in Africa after a bicycle and cell phone. Fourth would be a DVD player.

Reacting to reality rather than imposing old paradigms

Finally, my interest in media access is derived from my desire to understand how information is being shared and acted on in Africa. I came into the continent with preconceptions about the results we were shooting for, namely, reducing a language to writing, producing materials for people to read and then teaching them to read. But now I’m envisioning a scenario in which Mozambicans themselves are producing non-print media for an essentially aliterate population. Already, numerous organizations both foreign and local are tapping into advertising, marketing, word-of-mouth, and viral campaigns to try to effect change and improvement in people’s behavior and lifestyles. I’d like to better understand how all this works.

As an initial step in approaching the information challenge for Mozambique I have suggested that our organization use three media for three types of information:

Three Ways To Reach People:

1. Print: Booklets, growing Bibles, pocket libraries
2. Audio: mp3, radio programs
3. Internet: downloadable resources for computers and cell phones.

Three types of Life-Changing information:

1. Literacy: Dictionaries, grammars, primers and reading resources
2. Development: HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Clean water and sanitation
3. Biblical: Bibles, hymnals and Christian education materials

We have been working in Mozambique since 1986, so there is a huge corpus of data in more than a dozen languages as well as technical papers on language use that have been produced. They have been produced but they are not available. So we are working hard on collating all the materials we have and bringing them together in a single location. Once they are available we want to make them accessible through print, audio and Internet. An open question is whether or not these media will result in true accessibility and finally, the holy grail, will people be able to profitably use this information.

So, I’ve got a lot to learn but these are some of the strategies I’m shooting for at this stage and some of the terminology I use to talk about it. I welcome your ideas on this topic as well as links to others that are doing this kind of work. Feel free to leave your comments below or contact me by private message.