Creating a Community Radio: IQfm workshop. With the support of Media Aid Onlus we had the second workshop to the guys who are setting up a community radio in Samora Machel, Philippi.

September, 2015. Pride, Iqhayiya in the Xhosa language, is the name of a small community radio that wants to be born in a rudimentary studio set up in two small rooms in the Samora Machel community center in Philippi, a suburb of over 200,000 inhabitants in the Cape Flats. It is managed by a group of volunteers and aims to broadcast music and information, especially that information that no other broadcaster collects and disseminates, unless it is a question of sensational episodes of crime, fires, violent demonstrations, popular protests. They called it Iqhayiya because they want it to be the flag of a community that proudly wants to tell the world: “Here we are!”.

The Rainbowmediateam has held its second workshop for the group of young people who wish to work in what will become IQFM. The Samora Machel Community Center can be reached by driving along the N2 between Cape Town and the mountains of Sir Lowry’s Pass. A wide, orderly road branching off the highway and called N7 or Vanguard Drive, after passing through the commercial and industrial zones in which Oriental Plaza and the Southern Winds shipyards operate, enters the tangle of modest houses and shacks where the 200,000 inhabitants counted by the last census live. A few kilometers further on you turn left, then right and then left again, and when you no longer know where you are, there is the parking lot and the small playground of the community centre, a multifunctional building where people of good will seek to give community life organization and services. They are all young volunteers, around twenty girls and boys.
MediaAid, an Italian NGO that helps and supports the development of the media as a tool for social equity, founded in Rome on the initiative of a group of journalists from various publishing realities, donated a lap top, a tablet, a digital recorder and a microphone for reporting outside the newsroom. UCT, on the other hand, donated a desktop PC for the broadcasting studio and a second tablet.
The workshop was mainly a co-design initiative for the design of the radio website (made by Slowdesign). It was conducted by Andrea Couvert, Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, (who is also among the founders of Media Aid), Claudio Farinelli and Maria Rosa Lorini (already involved in various social projects in the Cape Flats) who carries on the project inside of her PhD from the University of Cape Town.