Media

Community radio in South Africa

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Community radio, by its nature, struggles to access advertising and other forms of financing.

Yet it remains a crucial part of the South African broadcasting landscape, providing diversity for listeners and much-needed skills for the commercial radio sector.

There are an estimated 10-million radio sets in South Africa, with listeners many times that number, broadcasting a range of programming from ultra-hip urban music to local news and information in the deep rural areas.

You can listen to radio on the airwaves, via satellite and on the internet.

All 11 of South Africa's official languages get airtime, as well as German, Hindi, Portuguese and the San languages of !Xu and Khwe, with stations falling into three broad categories: public service broadcasting, commercial, and community radio stations.

During the apartheid era, broadcasting was firmly in the grip of the state-run South African Broadcasting Authority. With democracy came the deregulation and liberalisation of broadcasting, and the number of stations operating outside of the authority's control proliferated.

Community radio in South Africa began in 1994, when the county's broadcasting authority began the continuing process of assessing and granting licence applications from groups as diverse as rural women's cooperatives, Afrikaner communities and a variety of religious bodies.

The country now has over 100 community stations, broadcast in a number of languages.

Their scope and reach varies enormously - from the half-a-million Joburgers who make up the audience of Jozi FM to, for example, the mere one thousand people who listen to Ilitha Community Radio in the Eastern Cape town of Maclear.