Keeping Girls in the Picture: Community Radio Toolkit

"If girls lose out, we all lose out. We must 'keep girls in the picture' - we must make sure that all girls are learning and that #LearningNeverStops."

This toolkit for community radios has been developed as part of the #LearningNeverStops campaign, which was initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and members of the Global Education Coalition in the context of COVID-19. The campaign calls for efforts to safeguard progress made on girls' education, to ensure girls' learning continues during school closures, and to promote girls' safe return to school once these reopen. It also sheds light on the 130 million girls who were already out of school before the pandemic, and calls on the international community to urgently work together to guarantee their right to education.

As part of the campaign, community radio stations are being mobilised at the local level to access hard-to-reach communities, and this toolkit was developed to assist radio stations to produce programming that would support the campaign. It is designed to help radio journalists with stories and messages and in creating exciting and memorable content for community radio programmes. The toolkit firstly contains messages and facts from the global campaign. This content has not been tailored for any specific region, country, or area but encourages journalists to make it relevant to their audiences and contexts - drawing on local data and voices from local communities. It also explores various journalistic issues, such as obtaining consent, finding story angles, and using different radio programming formats to raise awareness about girls' education.

The toolkit contains the following chapters:

1. Campaign overview: includes an overview of the campaign and offers key messages for radio programming.
2. Content: provides information about the toolkit and key facts about girls' education and the impact of COVID-19 on girls' continuity of learning.
3. Consent: explains the importance of consent to ensure that journalists do not put children at risk and offers a sample consent form and information on the law in relation to consent forms.
4. Production guide: helps radio journalists decide what formats to choose for their shows and offers tips on how to put them together, from preparing shows to choosing an angle and getting ideas for shows.
5. Formats: describes the different formats journalists can use to share information and tell stories, such as pre-recorded content, a live show, or a combination of elements, both pre-recorded and live (e.g., interviews, vox pops, audio commentary, panel discussions, debates, audio profiles, protagonists, audio diaries, and public service announcements).
6. Advocacy, your audience and feedback: looks at the role radio can play in advocacy, how to engage different audience groups, and how to obtain feedback from radio programmes in order to assess the impact of a radio show.
7. UNESCO's Global Education Coalition: offers background information on the Global Education Coalition, which was launched by UNESCO to safeguard learning for all amid the COVID-19 crisis.