Participatory communications as a tool for women’s empowerment: A study of five community radio stations in Northern Ghana

In the process of achieving social equity and local development in Ghana, the empowerment and improvement of the lives of women remain critical factors, because of the existing role women and girls assume in the household and larger communal setting. In Northern Ghana culture and religion have historically side-lined, and in some cases, completely excluded women from participating in the dialogues, economic and political processes that lead to, or facilitate the transformation and development of their households and communities. Even though the media has largely contributed to the discrimination and stereotype of women through how women are represented in mainstream media, the Ghanaian media, in its assumed role as the “fourth estate of the realm” has the power to explicitly advocate and implicitly frame messages which can accelerate the processes of social change, women’s empowerment and social inclusion through the community radio broadcast system (Diedong, 2017: pp. 59, 64). After 30 years of the liberalization of the Ghanaian media and 25 years after the opening of the first community radio station, there have been few studies of how community radio influences women’s empowerment, how it gives opportunity for women to participate in political processes and whether, and how, it strengthens the livelihood capabilities of women. This research was motivated by the empowerment theory and the theory of participatory development communications. The researcher also makes references to feminist media theory in his arguments about the need for women to have access to radio in order to make their own content and also listen to content produced by other women. This study adopted a mixed methods research approach and collected data through programme analysis of the sampled radio stations, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. After field data was collected, they were analysed in themes that focus on the objectives of this study, data is presented through thematic discourse methods in order to help the ...