By Joseph Lamin Kamara
The Independent Radio Network (IRN), the largest network of radio stations in Sierra Leone, will begin broadcasting its programmes to an international audience at the end of January, 2015.
This has been made possible through the donation of radio link equipment worth Le 752, 500,000 (Seven Hundred and Fifty Two Million, Five Hundred thousand Leones) from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
IRN, which began with just six radio stations, has over the years grown to 27 partner stations across the country. It has over the last 20 years been simultaneously broadcasting programmes of national interest, notable among them the general elections in 2002, 2007 and 2012. Their latest project, which is being done in collaboration with the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, is the coverage of the fight against Ebola which has seen 21 more stations included into the fold.
The information communications service provider Tiwai Memory Masters has been hired to do the connection for the network. Its Technical Director, Mohamed Turay, told Politico that UNDP had contacted them early January for the task which will see IRN transmitting station connected to more community radio stations.
Before now many of the stations have been hooking up to the network manually which affected signal quality. But also, importantly, the new equipment will allow the network to transcend international boundaries.
“[This] connection will secure voice from the IRN transmitting station in Freetown and encapsulate it to a data packet which will then pass the voice over internet protocol and decapsulate it and send it to many other radio stations. With this we can have over 255 concurrent outfits, meaning we can expand the transmitting station to about 255 stations far away,” Turay said.
The technical director added that IRN would now broadcast its programmes over internet as a radio station “all over the world.”
The installation process is expected to complete at the end of January.
Edward Kamara, Head of Governance, UNDP, said it was their “mandate to promote good governance” and ensure that citizens participated in governance of their country and were provided with information about national issues.
“We’ve seen that IRN has done just that so we thought it’s good to partner with them,” Kamara stated at the handing over ceremony earlier at the UNDP country office.
Sudipto Mukerjee, UNDP Country Director, said the Ebola outbreak would be contained but that it would leave impact on the country and therefore “we are now concerned with multisectoral recovery programmes.”
He said they were building on the “good media landscape” in the country to ensure that Ebola survivors did not face stigmatization and the country retraced its development strides.
IRN National Coordinator Ransford Wright thanked UNDP and assured that its partnership with IRN “will grow from strength to strength.” He noted that they were nonpartisan and they focused on “promoting good governance and democracy in the country and through that, “IRN has created a niche for itself.”
Wright said after covering the 2002 general elections they did a study on the impact their network created and they “saw that people solely depended on IRN for credible information.”
“We realised that we needed to broaden our operation,” he said.
Wright went on to state however that they had challenges.
“We had crude system with no professional system and we were using makeshift” structures, he said. With those challenges, he added, they approached the UNDP.
© Politico 29/01/15
