RADIO ACCESS TO RURAL WOMEN, FOR INFORMATION & KNOWLEDGE EMPOWERMEN THE CASE STUDY OF JOLIE WOREDA GURAGIE ZONE S/N/N/P REGIONAL STATE, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

This study conducted on radio accessibility to rural women; with a particular reference of southern part of Ethiopia the place called “Jolie”. with specific place “Jolie Ande” The areal size of the place was 800 hector; the number of population 3,725 at household levels 724; the community life was majorly based on agriculture. Their first & mainly spoken language was guragegna. In developing countries like Ethiopia media has indispensable role for community mobilization & participation for development. To this end media is expected to be accessible to different level of the society especially for rural women because they were the one among those denied media access. The study need to carry out with the assumption that, radio can play a key role to information & knowledge empowerment to rural women for life betterment. The reason why this area was selected was just because the place was categorized among the rural area, which was the researcher familiarity with. The main objective of the study was to assess how far radio was accessible to rural women for information & knowledge empowerment & also, to assess rural women trend using radio as information &knowledge source. Both qualitative & quantitative methods were used; the data were gathered through mainly questionnaires and also interview. In the study area, Among 724 households; 75 households were sampled; using multistage sampling technique, the data was analyzed by use of descriptive statistics. XII. 16 The study examined that accessibility of radio to rural women; In the study area there was no community radio, which was commonly recommended for rural community; the only radio that had regular coverage on the area was Ethiopia radio national service; though in that service there was no program or air time that broadcasted by Guragegna (local) language, since in that woreda majority of the community their first& mainly spoken language was Guragegna. The study result shows that rural women had information need & also interested to get information about their own affairs as well as current issues &news but their trend to use radio as information & knowledge source was poor as the data result shows the major reason for that lack of time, but radio program content & approach had its own contribution. Among the programs those were aired in Amharic language, there was women targeted program, that broadcasted at late in the morning, but most of the rural women respondents reported that their convenient time to listen radio was at late in the evening; not only that the program approach itself not considered rural women ground realities; the program was not rural women targeted program rather general for all women, for all those who could listen Amharic language in the country. All the stakeholders also believed that radio is the best alternative to the rural women information & knowledge empowerment; Regarding radio accessibility to rural women, almost all of the them agreed that it was not accessible as expected; XIII. 17 the reasons were, not expansion of community radio ,national radio broadcasters couldn’t address rural women issues as it should be; because of language diversification ,geographical barriers ,and those broadcasted programs were not targeted in approach rural women ground realities & inconvenient of broadcasting time program. As a result radio accessibility to rural women was still in questioned at least in the study area & like. Therefore radio to be accessible to rural women for information & knowledge empowerment; the study recommended that community radio should be expand, the national radio broadcast services should improve their accessibility to rural women by considering its geographical coverage, content & approach; it also need to work on the area, in providing simple innovative technology that could help them to reduce their workload and to get spare time.