Farm Radio International’s 2018 top ten

This year was a big one for our Farm Radio International, and while there’s a lot to say about what happened in our work in 2018, we’ve made a handy top 10 list to narrow it down.

  1. We opened new offices in two new-to-us countries: Senegal and Nigeria, as well established a new office in a familiar country, Kenya.
  2. Farm Radio-supported radio programs covered a total of 150 million people across Africa with almost 50 million people tuning into at least one episode.
  3. For the first time ever, we added resources for broadcasters in three new local languages: Amharic, Kenyan Swahili and Oromifa and published at least 40 resources for broadcasters in five different local languages, including Swahili and Hausa, as well as French and English.
  4. We added approximately 150 new broadcasting partners to our network of more than 780 broadcasting partners across 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
  5. Our backgrounder on the Fall armyworm – which provided key information for broadcasters to use in their reports about the invasive species – was our most popular online resource ever, downloaded 295 times by broadcasters across Africa.
  6. We launched exciting new projects on gender, sexual and reproductive health, reducing food waste, climate-smart agriculture and health and nutrition across our 11 offices!
  7. We added 671 radio broadcasters to our network, making it a total of 2328 broadcasters who receive our weekly newswire service which includes resources and stories that can be read on air. We’re also in touch with almost 500 of those broadcasters via WhatsApp, a mobile phone messaging platform.
  8. Our digital innovation team continued to work hard to make radio a two way communications tool. We launched Uliza Answers this year, where listeners can call in to our system and leave a question. We push those questions to the experts who then record the answer that farmers receive in response.
  9. One of our goals is to find a way to make agriculture radio programs long-term and sustainable. To this note, we ran a successful and enlightening e-discussion between 127 people across 23 countries about how to generate revenue for your farmer program.
  10. We developed and launched a brand new website: farmradio.org! Learn more about who we are by exploring our excellent (if we do say so ourselves) site!

Stay tuned for what we get up to in 2019. Farm Radio International turns 40 on May 1, 2019 and we can’t wait!

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