It was Worth a Journey into the Radio World
By Joseph Kambarage, Research Assistant, UN Global Pulse Kampala
The global rise in Gender-Based Violence (GBV) that falls disproportionately on women and children has not spared Ugandan society. This is clear from the Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Resource Toolkit produced by the US Embassy in Uganda.
The fight against this evil has seen charity organizations, NGO’s and the government itself join forces to curb the vice. Various interventions have been aimed at helping rural communities and the poor. However, urban dwellers and working women are also badly affected. We noticed this during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, which brought to light the violence that women and girls go through. After the pandemic, we continued to uncover insights as we “mined” the world of radio for perceptions on gender-related issues.
Pulse Lab Kampala used Radio Mining, an advanced form of monitoring, to explore the rich data sets from public radio discussions, where people from the community shared real-life stories of violence, opinions, observations and heartfelt comments. All this was made possible by our Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) tool.
What, you may wonder, is an automated speech recognition tool? Well, it was something we developed along with a team from Stellenbosch University in South Africa. It streams radio waves from broadcasts and breaks them down into five-minute clips, using what we call “raspberry pies” to identify areas of interest.
We filter out any music so the remaining audio, saved in the cloud, can be transcribed by the ASR. A keyword filter picks out conversations relevant to the EU/UN Spotlight Initiative. These audio clips of data related to GBV are displayed for human analysis. You can see how it works here:
Mining gender perceptions using the radio mining and analysis tool
The Spotlight Initiative is a global, multi-year partnership between the European Union and the United Nations to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls by 2030. In Uganda, Spotlight works with the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, as well as UN Agencies.
Gender-related issues have been categorised as: Gender-Based Violence (GBV), Violence Against Children (VAC), Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) and Harmful Practices (HP). So we mined the data in those five major areas.
As you may know, radio data is mostly “qualitative” in sense that people voice out their needs, distresses and demands but with these categorisations, we were able to say how many discussions were taking place in these particular topics. This gave us insights into the prevailing issues/public concerns and perceptions that need to be addressed.
Topics covered included sensitization campaigns, experiences, opinions, incident reports and real-time scenarios.
This visual will help you to see what we mean:
Breakdown of discussions by topic, as seen from June 14-Dec 15 2022
The data also allowed us to see who was speaking: Media personalities; radio presenters/moderators; listeners who called in or visited the studio to express views or share experiences; community leaders; local councils and officials; and government officials from district level to top offices.
From the data, we saw that men seemed to participate slightly more in the radio conversations than women. This could be because men have more time to call, or perhaps they are more vocal, while women shy away from talking about their issues. This discovery was quite surprising. With the victims of violence being mostly women and girls, we initially thought females would have more to say. But the data showed a different picture.
Total Percentage breakdown of Male and Female Speakers
Radio is a whole universe of different conversations from news, sports and music to adverts, announcements, greetings and cracking jokes. We narrowed this universe to three areas of discussion: 1) Incident reports (phone calls and real-life experiences); 2) Sensitization messages/campaigns (people offering advice, talk shows focusing on informing the public); and 3) News (news anchors reporting on incidents and field recordings from ground personnel). Here are our insights:
Percentage breakdown by discussion type, Dec 1-Dec 15 2022
Analysing radio stations that air content about gender enabled us not only to see which ones might be fruitful for our purposes but also helped our partners to decide where to target sensitization campaigns. They needed stations with specific slots for programs related to violence.
Important factors for getting our message across included whether or not a station was state-owned, served a particular religious audience or used common languages, Luganda being the most widely spoken in the central region. In addition, some radio stations had better channels of communication than others. On some, listeners could text or send voice recordings on WhatsApp and Facebook. But it was better if they also accepted phone calls from the public.
Breakdown of the top radio stations for the period 14 June -15 Dec 2022:
In radio discussions about violence against women, we expected to hear quite a lot about “teenage pregnancies” but they were often referred to instead as “adolescent pregnancies”. For this reason, in our working definition of teenage pregnancy, we counted women under 20, who may have conceived because of rape, forced marriage or the dubious “choice” of marrying a rich man.
Also, “sentiment analysis” helped us to understand the emotions behind the various discussions.
In conclusion, we observed a growing willingness among Ugandans to talk about the problem of gender-based violence. Radio presenters are ready to advise the public on these sensitive issues. Our partners see this as an opportunity to raise awareness of media personalities, who in turn can spread the message that violence is never acceptable.
