Community Radios in Bangladesh: Change Maker at the Grassroots Society

Introduction

Abstract

Community radios are playing very important role in the firmament of grassroots level change and development in many ways. In the era of globalization, mainstream medias are dominating for providing news, information services and entertainment. Besides, in Bangladesh, community radios (hereafter CRs) are contributing to positive changes in grassroots governance and development. Based on a reality, this paper tries to unravel the following research objectives i.e. i) to get an overview of the profiles of the community radios in Bangladesh; ii) to provide a brief profile of the CRs in Bangladesh; and iii) To assess the role of the CRs in bringing change and development at the grassroots level. In a bid to achieve that case study method was followed where qualitative data were analyzed in line with the objectives. To substantiate qualitative data, few other tools such as focus group discussion(FGD), content analysis and observation methods were employed. The findings of case studies reveal that there are 18 community radios in Bangladesh, mostly situated at the remotest areas- they are providing all sorts of development information at the grassroots. These community radios were able to form listeners’ club through which huge numbers of school going children have got a platform to involve themselves in lots of creative endeavors. Some marginal communities such as fishermen, women, village farmers, rural poor communities, indigenous people are getting lots of development services from the community radios. Thus they are able to bring enormous change, development and transformation at the grassroots society.