Agriculture Case Study: Livestock Information on the Airwaves

Throughout the AudienceScapes data from the 2009 Kenya survey, radio emerges as the communication tool best able to reach a wide audience. This case study moves beyond identifying that national trend to show how an agricultural development organization might design a more effective radio campaign to reach a particular segment of Kenyan farmers: cattle owners.

The Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute estimates that “the livestock sector contributes over 30% of the AgGDP [GDP generated by agriculture] and employs more than 50% of the agricultural labour force. . . . Commodities from cattle, that is, beef and milk, account for more than 75% of marketed livestock production from the national stock of nearly 12 million cattle.”  [1]

In the AudienceScapes survey, 72 percent of livestock owners (representing 38 percent of all respondents) said they owned cattle. Most of these cattle farmers were operating at a very small scale—almost 90 percent had 10 animals or fewer (the median cattle farmer owns three cows).

Map 1 Kenyan Cattle Farmers' Main Locations
                                              
Two-thirds of all cattle farmers in the survey were located in the Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western regions; half of all respondents in these areas said they owned cattle (compared to a third or fewer in all other regions).

Cattle farmers’ most widely cited sources of livestock information were radio, veterinarians, and friends or family. NGOs and extension agents also reached about a fifth of cattle owners with information about these topics (see Chart 1).

Chart 1
         

A radio campaign therefore seems like a viable strategy, particularly if it were designed to encourage further discussion by listeners with others in their communities.

Based on cattle farmers’ station preference, programming aimed at them nationally would stand a better chance of reaching its audience using Radio Citizen, KBC Kiswahili and Kass FM than by using other stations (including some of the top stations identified in Section 3.1 when looking at the whole national sample; Chart 2).

Chart 2
       

Another approach would be to identify the stations mentioned most often in the regions where cattle farming is most prevalent, and use programming on those stations to spark word-of-mouth discussion about cattle throughout those key regions. Radio Citizen would still be a strong choice using this strategy, but a breakdown by region shows that smaller regional stations could also be useful (Charts 3 to 5).

Chart 3
          

Chart 4
          


Chart 5
          


As with most other Kenyan audiences, cattle farmers were most likely to speak and understand Kiswahili; in principle, a radio program in that language would be understood by more than 95 percent of the target audience. English would be less effective (about two-thirds of cattle farmers said they speak/understand English). Other Kenyan languages could potentially reach regional audiences: among cattle farmers in Nyanza Province, for example, more than half said they speak/understand Luo, while 65 percent of cattle farmers in the Rift Valley said they speak and understand Kalenjin and a full 96 percent of cattle farmers in the Western Province said they speak and understand Luhyia.

A strategy based on more-detailed analysis, therefore, could be significantly more nuanced than the first-cut approach of simply using radio to reach cattle farmers. Using the full depth of the AudienceScapes dataset, development practitioners could identify the three key regions for targeting their messages, saving resources by concentrating their efforts geographically.

Practitioners could then identify specific stations—either nationally, or in those targeted regions—most likely to reach cattle farmers and the communities in which they live.

Finally, by speaking the languages of those target communities, development practitioners’ radio messages would be far more likely to spark conversations and, ideally, to increase cattle farmers’ understanding of new or improved practices in their field.

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[1] Livestock Research,” Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, http://www.kari.org/index.php?id=274