The villages that answered the radio

In 2011, nearly four hundred listening clubs met around solar and wind-up radios in Tillabéri and Dosso, most of them women's clubs. They chose the subjects, and the station put their own voices on the air.

The radios did not need the grid. They charged in the sun, or you turned a handle until there was enough power to listen. By April 2011 there were 304 of them in 112 villages of Tillabéri and Dosso, along with 100 mobile phones that also charged from the sun. Around them met 398 community listeners' clubs, according to a 2011 report on the clubs. Most were women's clubs: 281 of them, against 105 men's clubs and 12 mixed ones. Of their 7,698 members, 5,704 were women.

In a club, listening was the third step. To begin, the members sat together and chose a subject they wanted to understand better. Someone got in touch with the community radio, and the station prepared a programme on that subject in answer to the request. The programme went out, and members listened, in a group or on their own. Then the talking started, inside the club and between clubs. Sometimes an expert came to help. The station recorded those discussions and broadcast them in turn, so the conversation went back out over the air in the villages' own voices. After the talking came a decision, a search for the means to act, the action itself, and at the end an account to the whole community of what had worked and what had not. The discussions were led by members chosen and trained for the role: 280 women and 100 men.

The radios and phones came through a development project, carried out by an organisation in Niger through its own network of literacy centres. Listening in groups was not new. The report says the clubs were inspired by radio clubs set up in the 1990s, and it describes those plainly. They usually had more men than women, and nobody talked back to the station except to start a fan club. In Tillabéri and Dosso the arrangement ran the other way. The clubs set the questions, and the station answered them.

The report lists the subjects the clubs chose. Among them were crops to get through the lean season, the health of animals and plants, hygiene, and women's access to land and water. Nine community stations took part, in towns that include Téra, Bankilaré, Gaya and Tanda.

Anyone who grew up with tales told at night will know this shape. Take Hausa storytelling. Once everyone is seated, the teller may open with a traditional call, and the listeners answer it with a line of their own, Ta zo mu ji ta, roughly “let it come, so we hear it”. The tellers are older women or men. They tell at night after the evening meal, in a courtyard, in a young woman's room or on the open ground of the village.

What changed in the villages is harder to count, and the report tries anyway. Observers in the field often mentioned how much confidence the women members had gained, and how they were taking their place in village life as participants in their own right. Speaking in public was part of it. Being listened to was the other part. Men heard their wives on the radio, the report says, and were proud of them.

Fifteen years on, many people in Niger already answer each other by voice every day, in voice notes passed from phone to phone in whatever language two people share. Much of the software that reaches those same phones still expects something else. It wants a typed question, a written menu, a form, a word spelled exactly right, and often a language other than the one spoken at home. The clubs needed a wind-up radio and a phone that charged in the sun. People chose the subject and said what they thought in their own words, and what came back over the air answered what they had asked. At Namu we build speech technology for the languages of the Sahel, and people answering back by voice, in their own language, is what we build it for.

The report counts nearly everything: radios, phones, clubs, members, leaders, twenty radio reporting kits. Near the end of its chapter on the clubs it stops for something with no number attached. It says the simple pleasure of spending time together and listening to each other is often forgotten, and that it was a large part of why the clubs succeeded. Above that sentence, the heading reads “Pleasure in being together”.