It has gone almost unnoticed that Nepal’s infant mortality rate has been reduced by half since 1990. How did that happen? Not because a lot of state-of-the-art hospitals were built. Fewer babies die in Nepal these days mainly because of the spread of awareness about safe drinking water. The message went out through radio, and made an impact because of higher literacy levels and better vaccination coverage.
And they’re doing this across the board.
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Radio 4 do a (weekly?) round-up of international radio shows, which I think might be Crossing Continents (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/default.stm). I don’t catch it often, but when I do, I’m struck by the proportion of features they run on radio stations in Asia and particularly Africa that are integrating public health/education messages in their broadcasts. It’s a spectacularly effective dissemination medium, it seems.
Which I guess isn’t a surprise to anyone who works in radio. But for the rest of us, it’s useful to be reminded that being huge doesn’t make YouTube the right solution in all circumstances.
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