Organizing a community radio station: The Employees

It's not essential for a community radio station to have employees, but it is necessary to have people who are committed to the bone. And since 80% of the community radios have seiced to exist within two years we thought it was important to have some stable factors in the radio station. We just employed three of them: two journalists and one technician. We thought a lot on how we would employ them, since the radio station has no money yet. But the Jimma University, who is helping this project a lot, was ready to pay for their salaries. Of course we thought a long time about this because the university is a semi-government institution, and since this is the first community radio station, it could be sensitive. But together we came up with a construction in which the independence of the station would be guarded, the JU will sponsor us monthly and the board allocates the money to he salaries.

After announcing the vacancies hundreds of people applied not only to be employed as a journalist or a technician, but also to serve the station as a volunteer. In cooperation with a group of experts, we selected the best journalists and technicians. To be sure that the process went as clean as a whistle we first conducted a test on them, the persons that past the test were interviewed. All the people of the employment committee could fill in points on different characteristics and in the end all the points were added. The problem was that the women underperformed, so our equality principle kind of backfired on us. Now we hope we can take a female intern, since a workplace without women is not a good example for a radio station which claims to work on women empowerment.