The initiative will establish a network of community listeners’ clubs across Mahagi Territory, transforming radio broadcasts into grassroots action for land rights, climate-smart agriculture, environmental conservation, public health, and community participation.
The day began, as most gatherings here do, with a prayer. By 9:20 in the morning on July 3, 2026, forty-eight field agents of Radio Terra FM had made their way to Kolokoto, near Mahagi Port in Wagongo chiefdom, some traveling long distances from the Plaine Alur, Djumalu, and Mukambu axes of Mahagi territory. They came for a single day of training with an ambitious purpose: to learn how to create and manage community listeners clubs, the structures through which Radio Terra intends to turn its broadcasts into organized local action across the Lendu Plateau and the wider Albertine region.
The summit, organized by Radio Terra with support from Environmental Defenders (ED), brought together the station’s community relays for training on the role of radio in community development and in supporting peasant activism in defense of natural resources and livelihood rights in Ituri province. By the time the meeting closed at 6:30 in the evening, each agent had left with a radio receiver in hand and a roadmap for launching a listener’s club in their own village beginning in August 2026.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, radio outperforms every other medium among local communities, particularly in rural areas. Audience studies indicate that radio captures over 62 percent of the national audience share, a figure that climbs to between 78 and 85 percent in rural provinces. In places like Mahagi territory, where roads are poor, grid electricity is absent, newspapers rarely arrive, and internet access remains a privilege of the few, the radio receiver is often the only reliable bridge between a farming household and the wider world.
But the team at Radio Terra has learned that broadcasting alone is not enough. Poverty in this region is not only a lack of money, food, or shelter. It is also a lack of information. When a farmer does not know that improved seed varieties exist, that a market across the lake pays better prices, that the law protects her right to her land, or that a rumor spreading through the village is false, that absence of knowledge deepens every other form of deprivation. Across the Lake Albert region, where most households depend on rain-fed subsistence agriculture and the majority of rural land is undocumented and vulnerable to grabbing, access to trusted information can be the key to resilience rather than destitution.
Listeners clubs are designed to close that gap. A club is an organized group of 20 to 50 community members who gather regularly to listen to educational radio programs, debate what they have heard, and decide together how to put the lessons into practice. Members then feed their questions, critiques, and stories back to the station, transforming radio from a one-way channel into a genuine community dialogue. The model has deep roots in rural Africa, where it first emerged in the DRC and Niger, and it has repeatedly proven itself as a tool for ending the isolation of remote communities. Experience from similar educational radio initiatives across rural Africa shows what is possible: farmers adopting improved practices, measurable increases in crop yields and household incomes, communities enacting their own conservation rules, and thousands of hectares of forest protected as a result of sustained programming and club discussions.
“A listeners club engages in active and systematic listening,” explained Samuel Warom Jariekong’a, who leads communications and programming at Radio Terra, during the training. “This goes far beyond simple, passive listening. Within the club, members debate the themes we broadcast so they can collectively put the lessons into practice. Radio Terra aims to transform the information it broadcasts into tangible social change.”
Warom was candid about why the issue matters so much in Mahagi. Women in the territory experience marked exclusion and are frequently confined to unpaid domestic labor, with their access to information limited and often filtered through men. Young people, who make up the majority of the population, lack platforms to express their concerns. And in a province where rumor and misinformation have repeatedly fueled conflict, the clubs are intended as what the station calls a strategic shield: a trusted framework for receiving verified, community-driven information and a secure space for dialogue.
Station director Uguti Upar Justin opened the substantive sessions by grounding the agents in Radio Terra’s identity. The station launched officially seven years ago and expanded its reach with a relay antenna in Daa-Blue Mountain in November 2023. Its editorial charter rests on five pillars: environmental protection and combating the impacts of mining extraction and climate disruption; disease prevention; gender equity, peace, and combating violence; youth empowerment; and promoting the value and dignity of work. Through programs such as Kilimo, its flagship agricultural broadcast, the station champions food self-sufficiency, land rights, environmental protection, and respect for local customs and traditions.
The director then walked participants through the practical methodology of building a club, from initial community mobilization through formal creation, activation of regular listening sessions, and sustained follow-up. Participants pressed management on the realities of the field. Agents Gaspard and Upenji Ng’om Udokokwar called on the station and its partners to guarantee ongoing logistical and technical support so that the new clubs remain dynamic rather than fading after an enthusiastic start, a concern the station acknowledged as central to the model’s sustainability.
Facilitation skills received equal attention. Efitia Jeanne, a community animator from the Nyarambe rural health zone, trained the agents on leading effective and inclusive meetings built on listening, tolerant discussion, synthesis, and collective decision-making. She also used the platform to raise the alarm about a more immediate threat. With Ebola Bundibugyo spreading in the DRC, she urged strict adherence to barrier measures, with special emphasis on the prohibition of transporting deceased bodies from affected areas into healthy zones. Since the outbreak began, Radio Terra’s producers and journalists have been in the studio daily, producing public health messages and prevention programming for farming communities across the affected region.
The final sessions covered the operational link between clubs and the station, including rapid feedback of community voices, decentralized broadcasts produced directly in villages, street interviews, and community-scripted educational drama for on-air broadcast, as well as the registers, logbooks, and monthly reporting that will allow the station to track each club’s progress. According to Lonyo Sarah, program manager, each club will submit a monthly report synthesizing listeners’ feedback, and the formal creation of clubs across the three axes will begin in early August 2026, following community sensitization campaigns throughout July.
Of the 48 agents trained, four were women. The station is frank about that imbalance and views the clubs themselves as one of the tools for correcting it by guaranteeing women equitable access to information and strengthening their participation in public and political life at the village level.
Radio Terra broadcasts on two frequencies, 95.0 and 97.0 FM, and a digital channel, tying together the two sides of Lake Albert in Uganda and the DRC. It is a nonprofit, independent station affiliated with Environmental Defenders, and international law anchors its mandate. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants affirms the right of rural people to seek, receive, develop, and impart information and to access and sustainably use the natural resources of their communities. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms Indigenous peoples’ right to establish their media in their own languages. Radio Terra exists to make those rights real on the Lendu Plateau.
The station broadcasts 18 hours a day in the languages spoken across the region, including Swahili, Lingala, French, Alur, Runyoro, Lugungu, Kilendu, and English, reaching listeners across the DRC and Uganda, with recent listener perception surveys conducted by the program teams indicating spillover audiences in South Sudan and Rwanda. Its programming spans climate-smart agriculture, natural resource management, land and tenure rights, community health, maternal health, youth development, and women’s rights. A production studio alongside the on-air studio creates songs, jingles, radio scripts, and drama performances developed with community input and distributed to other stations for wider reach. Together with the more than 5,000 listeners club members already active across the region, the station’s agents help millions of disadvantaged rural households turn broadcasts into better harvests, safer health practices, and stronger claims to their land.
The station also gives voice to those pushed to the margins by the region’s conflicts and extractive pressures: communities evicted from their native lands without fair compensation to make way for extractive industry or conservation projects and denied their right to free, prior, and informed consent. Radio Terra identifies environmental and human rights defenders above all by what they do. They are small-scale farmers without land deeds, fisherwomen, teachers in remote communities, and Indigenous leaders defending ancestral land, many of whom become defenders by necessity rather than choice.
None of these tasks is easy. There is no grid electricity where Radio Terra broadcasts, and keeping a station on air for 18 hours a day in a remote borderland demands constant improvisation. The station depends on solar power and generators, and the hot, dry, dusty conditions shorten the life of both. Temperatures that exceed 40 degrees Celsius for much of the year overheat broadcast equipment, and fine dust works its way into everything. Spare parts are difficult to find in local markets, and poor-quality fuel accelerates wear on the generators.
The human infrastructure is just as fragile. There are few broadcast or electrical engineers in the region, and the station lacks an on-site engineer. Instead, it relies on remote support and periodic visits from Arua, Kampala, Nairobi, and the United States. When a critical piece of equipment fails and the team on the ground cannot repair it, the station can remain off air for days, cutting millions of listeners off from news, health alerts, and agricultural programming. These challenges mirror what media development researchers have documented at remote community stations across East Africa and the Sudans, where solar dependence, harsh climates, and the absence of nearby technicians are among the leading threats to broadcast continuity. Radio Terra’s answer has been to invest in the skills of its team, learning maintenance and troubleshooting so the signal stays alive.
“The strength and continuity of Radio Terra’s non-stop broadcasting rely heavily on the courage and dedication of our teams on the ground,” director Uguti Upar Justin told the agents in his closing remarks, thanking them for their commitment before sending them home to begin the work.
The agents are now back in their communities across the Plaine Alur, Djumalu, and Mukambu axes, carrying radio receivers, training notes, and a schedule. Sensitization and mobilization meetings run through July. Budgets will be reviewed at the station’s monthly meeting at the end of the month. In early August, the first clubs will be formally created, each with between 20 and 50 members, each a small assembly where a farmer can ask a question, a woman can speak without her words being filtered, a young person can be heard, and a village can decide together what to do next.
Community radio serves to address the issues in a region where information has often come as rumor and where the people who depend most on the land have had the least say in its future. Radio Terra and Environmental Defenders invite partners, donors, and fellow media organizations to join us in sustaining and expanding this work across the Albertine region and the Congo basin in Africa
Learn more at https://watetezi.org/community-media/
