Bangladesh's community radios: what they broadcast and who listens

Abstract

In the age of globalization and ICTs revolution, conventional media are playing sine qua non role in providing news, information services, and entertainment. Besides, in some countries, community radios (hereafter CRs) are contributing to positive changes in grassroots governance and development. Based on a reality, this paper tries to unravel the following research objectives i.e. i) to get an overview of the program contents of the community radios in Bangladesh; ii) to identify the profiles of the listeners of the CRs in Bangladesh. In a bid to achieve that a mixed method approach was followed. For quantitative data, survey method was used which was followed by some qualitative tools in order to achieve triangulation in research. The findings reveal that there are 18 community radios in Bangladesh and they are providing all sorts of development information at the grassroots. It was found that most of listeners both comprised of male and female were very young and 44% of them were students. A 40% of the respondents have SSC and above level of education. A 70% listeners used to listen CRs using mobile phone. The contents of the programmes of the CRs included a wide range of developmental issues i.e. agriculture, fisheries, livestock, climate change, disaster mitigation, women empowerment, education, news and newspaper, entertainment with music and drama, special programmes of national and international days, learning English, beautification and cooking, programmes for children and minority people. Through their diverse programmes these CRs are providing lots development services to the grassroots societies.