Consultation Workshop on Self-Assessment Toolkit for Community Radio Practitioners

New Delhi-4/9/2012: CEMCA Community Radio Facilitation Centre (CCFC) set up with a grant from Ford Foundation has been actively engaged in supporting community radio sector through interventions in Infrastructure Development, Advocacy and Capacity Building.  Crystallizing CEMCA’s rich and varied engagement with functional CRS, new and potential entrants,   CCFC has undertaken to develop two good practices guidelines and toolkits namely   Ethical practices Guidelines (EPG) to provide a theoretical concept for assessment of functional CRS and, Self-Assessment Toolkit (SAT) -- a practical guide to ascertain the level of good practice among the CRS.

The SAT was initiated as ground-up process a year ago, in October 2011. Two CRS   Radio Active (Bengaluru, Karnataka) and Chanderi Ki Awaaz (Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh) were identified as research partners to help test the ideas among their staff and communities.  Examining and deriving from global practices and   research partner feedback, a draft was formulated and shared at   the first consultative workshop held in December 2011 engaging a wider group of CRS.  Developed as a set of questions under the various operational aspects of a CRS, it was also placed in the   public domain for CR practitioners, observers and enthusiasts to review and reflect, while the partner CRS kept testing, adding and refining the set of questions further in the light of the challenges faced by them. 

CEMCA will organize the second Consultative workshop on 8-9 October 2012 and engage with a larger group of CR Stations, who are expected to validate the field reports as well as contribute to refining and detailing the questions further.  The toolkit will be revisited in the light of the workshop deliberations, placed in a public domain once again for a period of time and a final version of SAT published by February 2013.