Gregoire Salaki is the director of programming at Radio Salaki in Burkina Faso’s Boucle de Mouhoun region, and has cultivated a 22-year broadcasting career rooted in childhood passion. Volunteering at local radio stations in high school led to being recruited for a local station. But Mr. Salaki is not merely a radio lover; he is a linguist who speaks many languages, making it easier for rural listeners to understand and benefit from radio.
For the past five years, Mr. Salaki has been teaching various skills to broadcasters in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, including interactive broadcasting, gender-sensitive journalism, and solutions journalism.
Currently, he works on two programs: Koobnooma, where invited experts raise awareness of good farming practices, and Farmers’ Forum, where experts answer farmers’ questions on-air.
In Mr. Salaki’s region, farmers use many chemicals when farming. But thanks to his programs, they’re cutting back and using natural weed killers, helping the environment and enabling some farmers to successfully market organic herbicides.
Audience members tell Mr. Salaki that the expert information they receive on his program is useful, and that radio fills the information gap when experts are not able to travel to their areas because of conflict. They say the information they receive is “ready-to-use.”
Mr. Salaki keeps his audience engaged by including the voices of farmers throughout his listening area, by playing music from their villages, and by making sure that the programs directly focus on his listeners’ concerns.
He has worked on several projects with Farm Radio, and has found some of FRI’s training particularly valuable, including the VOICES standards, the training he received on intros and extros, and the quality assessment of programs.
Farm Radio International (FRI) is a Canadian non-profit organization specializing in ICT-enabled extension and communication for reaching rural and remote communities at scale in local languages in sub-Saharan Africa. FRI’s core expertise is collaborative, user-focused co-creation of quality information and advisory services, combining radio and mobile phones, other ICTs and face-to-face interaction