Nelly Bassily | May 14, 2012
Welcome to this special 200th edition of Farm Radio Weekly! As we are celebrating this week, we wanted to try something different and introduce the normally shy team to you! We are based in three time zones, so we often find ourselves meeting online at strange hours of the day and night to bring FRW to you every week. But as you can tell from our profiles below, we find this job very satisfying. We have each chosen our favorite story from the last 200 editions – or four and a half years − together with an explanation of why the story made an impression on us.
Over the last two years, FRW has benefitted from the talents of journalists across Africa who work through our two news bureaus. Our Bureau for francophone Africa is managed by Nourou-Dhine Salouka, at JADE Productions in Burkina Faso. Salouka, as we know him, manages a pool of 11 writers from countries including Congo-Brazzaville, Mali, Guinea, Burundi, Madagascar and Burkina Faso. He is a keen young journalist himself, and has also written stories for FRW. Mark Ndipita is our bureau chief for Southern Africa. He is an agricultural communication specialist, having studied both agriculture and journalism. He works with writers from Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Kenya.
In this special edition, we profile three of these writers, and hear more about the media in their countries and their experience of writing for FRW. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Canadian Auto Workers-Social Justice Fund which has allowed us to open and operate these bureaus and bring you original stories full of farmers’ voices and experiences.
Farm Radio Weekly’s target audience is African farm radio broadcasters. We now have a little over 2200 African subscribers! But we want to continue to grow, and we welcome subscribers from any background who are interested in reading and sharing our stories about farmers.
Please encourage your colleagues and networks to subscribe to FRW! Use this link http://farmradio.org/english/partners/fr_weekly_subscribe.asp
We hope you enjoy this special edition and we look forward to bringing you many more exciting issues of FRW!
-Karen, Nelly, Vijay and Heather, the Farm Radio Weekly team