Our goal is to celebrate excellence on radio | Naa Kwaley

Story By:  Rahamatu-Lahi Zakaria || Sanatu Zambang

The lead organizer for Northern Radio Awards, Naa Kwaley Richardson was on Sanatu Zambang Hotspot live to discuss the recently held Northern Radio Awards scheme and why the need to organize such an awards scheme. She said the goal for the awards scheme is to celebrate excellence on radio in northern Ghana.

‘’Northern Radio Awards is basically an awards scheme for radio journalism in Northern Ghana. Our goal is to celebrate excellence on radio because radio is predominately the media use across northern Ghana and it has been very key and pivotal for our socio-economic development of northern Ghana’’

Naa Kwaley

‘’The awards seeks to redefine what radio is in terms of northern Ghana media and also to project the heritage of northern Ghana media because across the country, we seems to be underdeveloped. And so, we also have the opportunity to redefine what radio should be, not towards Accra, but towards international platforms. So our activities and actions are design towards that goal.’’  She added.

This year awards scheme, the organisers decided to bring all five region under one region to have one awards show unlike the previous events. With the previous events, they held each awards show in their respective region. The new change she says was challenging and more expensive to organize. Apart from the challenges she that highlighted, she says organizing the event was interesting and full of discovery for her and her team.

‘’In terms of discovery, it was exciting, it was interesting, and we found the first female sport presenter in Zebila. She does it in the local language and she is very good and articulate. You listen to her and you could hear all the technical terms in football.’’

Naa Kwaley

Elaborating more on that, she says they had to go round the five regions in the north and collect data on all the radio stations we have. This data included, the structures in terms of the studio set up, personnel, content and everything that make up radio practice to serve it three core mandate; information, education and entertainment.

When asked if northern radio stations are using the media to set agenda and promote development, she answered in the negative.  According to her, their researched found out that ‘’ almost all the radio stations in the northern region, 90% use 4hours to talk about politics, at least entertainment takes three days. So virtually we are not doing anything’’.

‘’But there was an outstanding one. You take RADFORD of Tumu. They are excellence media house. They use it to propagate agendas in their community.’’ She added.

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