Abstract
Ethiopia's community radio landscape, with over 50 licensed stations and approximately 35 broadcasting nationwide, serves as a vital information source in rural areas, broadcasting in over 20 local languages. Despite their significance, these stations face challenges in governance, financial sustainability, and program quality. The media viability assessment aimed to understand these challenges, prioritize them, and inform support activities. The assessment involved 35 managers and program heads from 25 community radio stations and employed online surveys, desktop research, and limited expert interviews. Factors were scored on a scale of 1 to 10 for their importance to station viability, with most receiving high scores. Governance, programming, financial sustainability, and technical issues were key focus areas. The analysis revealed a clear recognition among managers of the complex challenges they face, with factors related to local issue coverage receiving the highest average score. Recommendations include developing robust financial sustainability strategies, prioritizing audience engagement, enhancing board leadership, creating strategic plans, advocating for high-quality content, providing training in project management and media management, offering technical skills training, facilitating networking among managers, and prioritizing digital capacity-building.
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