Recent record rain fall in Pakistan has caused devastated flooding through much of country severely affecting the residents of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sind and Baluchistan provinces. Flooding in Pakistan is expected to heavily damage mainly rural areas in Sindh after roaring down from the northwest and through the central agricultural heartland of Punjab. In a country where terrestrial and satellite television tends to dominate the media environment, radio remains a crucial resource that can be tapped into in order to inform Pakistanis affected by disaster.

As the rain continues to fall in Pakistan and the flood zone expands, now affecting over 14 million and causing some 1500 deaths, aid groups and government officials have needed to quickly deploy a means of communicating to the public how and where to evacuate and where they can find assistance. One recently established project to improve how aid agencies communicate with disaster-affected communities is Infoasaid. This is a consortium of the BBC World Service Trust and Internews and is funded by the UK Department for International Development. The project has been liaising with the humanitarian community to develop radio programs as part of Lifeline programming. This was broadcasting BBC Urdu and also on 34 local FM stations across the flood affected area and featured a highly popular call comment enabling people to ask direct questions.

As greater amounts of aid is being deployed and the call for aid strengthens, the importance of communication between aid organizations and the victims they are attempting to reach will become ever more important. There is reason to believe that efforts to inform Pakistanis through the use of radio will be effective. As the number of Pakistanis that are forced to evacuate their homes increases radio becomes an ever more important means of communication, as radios are generally portable and require less electricity and can be shared easily.

The table featured here highlights the reach of both Radio Pakistan the domestic radio leader in Pakistan and the reach of BBC Radio. There is no solid way of predicting the reach of either of these services during such crises. What it does highlight is the potential effectiveness of radio as a humanitarian medium even within a TV dominated environment like Pakistan.

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