No Ads, No Help: The Crisis Facing Rural Radio Stations

Julius Tumusiime, the Chairman of the Rural Broadcasters Association of Uganda

Broadcast media leaders and experts fear for the survival of rural radio broadcasting as access to advertising revenue keeps diminishing.

With the managers largely unable to raise the required revenues to fund the operations of the radio stations, the threat is not just the possibility of closing down, but it starts with the inability to produce and sustain content professionally.

Uganda’s media liberalization policy has led to the establishment of about 230 radio stations, with a big majority of these (close to 200) in the rural areas, many categorised or informally referred to as community radios.

For radio to independently survive, it must have access to advertising revenue. Julius Tumusiime, the Chairman of the Rural Broadcasters Association of Uganda, says it requires not less than 40 million shillings per month to operate rural/community radio.

On how a typical rural/community station in Uganda operates without external assistance, Tumusiime says that many cannot level afford to hire and sustain the basic personnel.

According to him, many end up hiring as few as two people, who have to perform tasks across the station, from editorial, through accounts to administration and engineering. He adds that these are also usually not professional in these fields.

This also affects the type and quality of content that is produced by the station, with neither professionalism, nor commitment.

In turn, without good and original content, it becomes harder to attract content, a vicious cycle.

Tumusiime says that, without enough resources to afford a professional accountant, they always leave under the constant fear of failure to comply with tax obligations.

Unfortunately, he says advertisers are increasingly preferring social media because, they feel, it gives instant results when their advert appears on the smartphone screen.

This comes as the rural/community radio fraternity celebrate seven years of support from the East Africa Radio Advertising Services Ltd (EARS), a company that mobilises advertising revenue for the broadcasters.

This is done by aggregating radio audiences into national and regional packages, which they present to the advertisers.

EARS Managing Director, Douglas Mutumba says individual rural stations cannot secure the required revenues from the market as they cannot compete with the “big Kampala stations” which are more organized, more established, and with more data to support their reach claims, among other advantages.

Yet, the advertisers, the corporate organisations, usually set their cash flow projections periodically and, therefore, the radios and the wider media, can only compete for that limited size of advertising revenue.

He stresses the importance of supporting radios, especially in the countryside, to remain in operation because of how many people radio reaches compared to social media.

Like Tumusiime, Mutumba says there is some misleading information that social media has a greater reach than radio, a notion he says is based on wrong data.

According to UCC, like other researches also show, more than 80 percent of adult Ugandans own a radio, compared to just about 26 percent who own a smartphone or access mobile Internet.

They say that social media is concentrated in the urban areas and more so amongst young people. Unfortunately, Mutumba says, advertisers are making decisions based on Global data and not Uganda or East Africa-specific data that would give them an informed decision.

Mutumba agrees that the future of radio still remains going digital. And for this, EARS is supporting rural radios to embrace the transition, not only in content development but also in reaching the public through the EARS app, a platform for all community radios to reach audiences online.

Incidentally, these challenges are not limited to the rural broadcasters in Uganda, but across the region, according to Alexander Sempf, Chairman of the EARS group in the region.

He says that while Uganda has more rural broadcasters than Kenya and Tanzania, with the latter only allowing broadcasting in Kiswahili, the challenge mainly remains limited access to revenues and competition with the big urban operators.

The future of radio remains the future of the community, according to Sempf, adding that radio remains strong in the region, because it is the closest to the community.

He also proposes that media houses should join forces so as to have a bigger voice and a bigger appeal on the market, which can even create a balance of power with the big digital companies.

Uganda Communications Commission, the regulator, says their is little they can do in the form of financially supporting the struggling rural broadcasters.

However, the UCC spokesman, Ibrahim Bbossa, says they can only do what is within their regulatory mandate, but adds that the regulator is open to ideas by broadcasters on what can be done.

-URN