MAZABUKA, Zambia - Deep in the heart of Zambia’s rural and impoverished Southern Province, where access to information is scarce and local concerns often go ignored, women are making sure their voices are heard - literally.

In Mazabuka, a sugar-rich farming area below the Kafue river, rural women must walk a mile to fetch water. But last year, after Panos Institute Southern Africa provided basic radio equipment, wind-up radios and training, a group of local women recorded a programme on their difficulties accessing clean ground water.

Through PSAf’s radio listening clubs project, the programme was played on national radio (the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation - ZNBC) and on Mazabuka's community radio station.

It soon yielded results. The town clerk of Mazabuka Municipal Council promised that new bore holes would be sunk to ease the water problem that women faced.

The Mazabuka case is one of the many success stories attributed to PSAf’s trademark programme, “Development Through Radio,” which uses radio listening clubs to provide a platform for marginalised rural communities - and particularly women - to voice their concerns, hold policymakers accountable and exchange ideas at the local level. The programme is at the core of PSAf’s vision of using information and communication technologies (ICT) to help underserved populations take part in public policy debates.

Launched as a pilot program in 1998, the programme has been piloted in selected districts of Zambia, Malawi and Namibia, and has evolved into two separate initiatives - the DTR project, which involves only women, and an initiative exclusively focused on HIV/AIDS, which also includes men and young people.

PSAf argues that local communities should help set the development agenda. As the most accessible and effective form of media for rural communities on the far side of the digital and educational divide, radio is key to this concept.

PSAf identifies existing community organizations and provides them with radio recording and listening equipment and basic training. Every week, the clubs choose issues for discussion and recording in their own language.

The discussion, recorded on a cassette, is sent to a local coordinator who ensures the discussion is broadcast on a local community radio station and acts as a liaison with an urban-based national radio producer. The producer solicits responses from experts and officials from government and NGOs, which are then integrated into a programme and sent out over the airwaves on a partnering national radio station, like ZNBC.

The idea is to enable rural people to voice their concerns to decision-makers who usually remain inaccessible. Evidence on the ground, in the form of boreholes drilled, roads and markets constructed and schools and clinics rehabilitated, renovated and electrified, shows that national and local decision makers are listening.

Additionally, the producers who go into the villages to train and equip radio listening clubs gain crucial experience, says Ben Kangwa, director of programmes for ZNBC. “It gives confidence to these reporters. It exposes them to what people in the villages are facing at a particular time,” he said. “It builds capacity among reporters.”

Now, as the women of Mazabuka seek to hold the government to its promise, they feel a new sense of empowerment. They are engaging government decision-makers and learning about new ideas from neighboring communities on issues ranging from maize production to marital strife. And they have earned respect as educators in the traditional culture of their own villages.

“Before the programme we didn't know how to go about radio production. … Things have changed. People are happy,” Dory Ng’andu, chairwoman of a Mazabuka radio listening group, says in her native language of Tonga. People in other villages say “we're happy with the work you are doing.”