The Missing Pillar: Financial Resource Capacity as the Weakest Dimension of Institutional Capacity in Zambia’s Rural and Peri-Urban Community Radio Stations
Description
Community radio is widely positioned as a vehicle for grassroots participation and rural development across sub-Saharan Africa, yet the institutional sustainability of individual stations remains persistently fragile. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study assessing the institutional capacity of rural and peri-urban community radio stations in Zambia, grounded in Institutional Capacity Building Theory and Resource Dependency Theory, and using the now-dormant Zambia Community Media Forum (ZaCoMeF) as a bounded case study. Survey data from station managers (N=19), corroborated by interviews with former ZaCoMeF officials and development partners, assessed institutional capacity across five dimensions: governance, human resources, financial resources, technical capacity, and programming. While overall capacity was moderate (M=3.61/5), financial resources emerged as the only dimension to fall below the scale midpoint (M=2.95), diverging sharply from comparatively strong governance and programming scores. This paper interrogates why financial capacity specifically underperforms, arguing through a resource dependency lens that stations’ structural reliance on unmediated, unpredictable external funding — absent an active umbrella body performing a boundary-spanning coordination function — undermines financial sustainability more fundamentally than any internal management deficiency. The paper also identifies a methodological finding of independent interest: the divergence between stations’ comparatively favourable self-rated governance capacity and less favourable external assessments, illustrating the value of mixed-methods triangulation in institutional capacity research. The paper concludes with station-level, sector-coordination, and policy recommendations for strengthening financial capacity in Zambia’s community radio sector.
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Quantitative data were drawn from a total population survey of Zambia’s approximately sixty licensed rural and peri-urban community radio stations, yielding N=19 station manager responses. Total population sampling was adopted given the small size of the target population, for which sub-sampling risked insufficient responses for meaningful analysis (Etikan et al. 2016). Qualitative data were drawn from purposive criterion samples of former ZaCoMeF officials (N=3), comprising two former Board members — one a founding member of the organisation’s original nine-member regional representative board in 2004 — and one former Chairperson who oversaw its administration through the 2015 revival attempt; and development partner representatives (N=2) from Panos Institute Southern Africa (PSAf), which played a direct institutional role in hosting ZaCoMeF’s Secretariat, and BBC Media Action Zambia, which has engaged the sector independently of ZaCoMeF through large-scale programming reaching up to thirty partner stations. The survey instrument comprised 41 items across six sections, including a 12-item, five-point Likert sub-scale (Section B) measuring institutional capacity across the five ICBT dimensions, a six-item sustainability sub-scale (Section C), and further sections measuring ZaCoMeF awareness and the current support landscape. Three items (B8, B10, C4) were reverse-scored to control for response-set bias, recoded prior to analysis (recoded score = 6 − original score). The instrument was reviewed for face validity against the ICBT framework prior to deployment, and skip logic directed respondents with no awareness of ZaCoMeF away from items requiring that awareness. Semi-structured interview guides for the two qualitative respondent groups were organised thematically around institutional background and, for former officials specifically, ZaCoMeF’s founding mandate, its activities and impact during the active period, and the causes and consequences of its decline.
Institutions
- Mulungushi UniversityCentral Province, Kabwe