Community Media Unit (CMU) - visibility

At the UK- Nigeria meeting on 6th April 2011, John Dada informed us that Fantsuam Foundation now has a team of enthusiasts keen to start their new Community Media Unit initiative. (Namely: Emmanuel Katung, Yakubu, Patience Stephen).
He explained that FF are bringing together several strands of existing services into this one unit to be called CMU, Community Media Unit

It’s a way of giving more focus to a programme and ensure it serves the various departments within FF.
As John said himself  the CMU is still very much on the drawing board, has no budget yet as is so often the case with the start of FF projects.
However, FF is already on the national Community Radio network and are looking at options of getting a licence. They already have the digital camera service, community theatre group, and links with local choir groups. In addition to this Fantsuam has a weekly radio slot and have started talking to the TV station for a discount for regular TV slots. Kaduna State Media Corporation, KSMC is the local station.

Initially John says  “For now, we'd like training opportunities for the staff and volunteers, and be able to have one dedicated staff for the CMU. TV subscriptions have cost associated but we can negotiate asking for their share of corporate social responsibility, etc

The objectives and the challenge of the Community Media Unit includes:

• Integrating Community Media into all FF programmes
• Radio and TV programme productions
• Developing technical skills in use of radio, digital cameras
• Developing local network for radio and TV content generation
• Job creation for youths as producers of content for radio and TV
• Setting up local community radio committees for programme production
• Resource mobilization: fund raising, proposals development, networking with professional and amateurs in broadcasting, convergence of radio and TV in  digital production etc

John reports that “We will at some stage have to purchase our own radio equipment: but that is a capital investment. If we put that at top of our agenda, we'll never take off the ground.
With our CMU, our target is the over 300,000 folks in the communities our microfinance serves.

With a fairly young population, we think we have a niche".
John intends to starts with Primary Health Education then water and sanitation, civic responsibilities, community engagement with children's education. At the moment Fantsuam’s community theatre focuses on HIV/AIDS. They plan to extend it to other health issues: sickle cell, water and sanitation, hypertension, diabetes, epilepsy, child rights, social protection.

Dadamac is hleping this project to be more visible