Using audio to empower African youth: Lesedi Mogoatlhe of South Africa’s Radio Workshop on amplifying young voices to make a difference

It might be cliché, but young people are indeed the future. They are the ones who will have to face the challenges of the world 30 years from now left behind by older people. Plus, young people tend to approach topics with a fresh mindset, often thinking outside traditional boundaries to find solutions. It makes sense that they have a say in how the world they’ll inherit is shaped. But often, they don’t.

South Africa-based Radio Workshop was founded to change that. In 2007, it came into being as the Children’s Radio Foundation, teaching youth to make radio programs, mostly at community radio stations in different countries on the continent. The goal was to give them the skills not only to report but also to become active citizens and leaders within their communities, creating dialogue around the things that they wanted to change.

Since its founding, Radio Workshop has trained over 5,000 youth reporters at more than 100 radio stations in 10 countries in Africa. Those programs, many in local languages, reach up to nine million listeners weekly. In 2021, the organization launched a podcast featuring narrative, sound-rich stories by young people. The goal is to bring stories told by Africans about Africa to a global audience. The episodes are distributed across podcast platforms, on international radio broadcast networks and on partner stations as free-to-use content.

Lesedi Mogoatlhe is Radio Workshop’s podcast host and editorial director. She comes from the world of documentary film and also used to work in front of the camera as an actor, host and voice artist. But at one point, she says, she became entirely seduced by the world of audio.

Radio Workshop's Lesedi Mogoatlhe

DW Akademie: Given your background in film and TV, you might think you’d be working with youth who want to make docs or at least video podcasts. Why have you gone the audio route?

Lesedi Mogoatlhe: There's a lighter footprint when making audio stories as compared to film. I found it sometimes really invasive, and I did struggle at times with showing up in people's homes with a whole crew. Sometimes I just wanted to sit and be alone with someone and allow them that kind of privacy which I think audio does. It allows for so much more intimacy in the telling of stories. What makes sense about doing audio is that it is cheap and easy to do. A lot of young people would tell us that they didn’t have money for data. For the most part, people in Africa don't have access to Wi-Fi in the same way the rest of the world does. Audio is less heavy.

Radio Workshop started out training young people to work in community radio stations and it still does that. Why did you start this podcasting side?

We wanted to have the stories of young people reach the world and have a bigger impact. And the transition happened like with many organizations during Covid. With all the restrictions, it became difficult to do in-person training, so we moved everything online. Training was happening via Zoom, or where data was a problem, via WhatsApp. And we're all thinking innovatively about how to continue the work. Once we digitized everything. It became a lot easier to imagine making a podcast, and we officially produced our first episode in 2021.

Dhashen Moodley (left) and Lesedi Mogoatlhe host a workshop on narrative podcasting in Nairobi, Kenya

How has the podcast been received since then?

It’s been great. It definitely doesn't hit the same numbers as the radio programs, which is why it's been important for us to figure out the bridge between the radio and podcasting and bring them together. But it's been great in terms of how people have responded to the podcast. We've won international awards, and we were invited to feature two episodes on NPR, where we reached an audience of about 23 million.

We've also managed to create listening parties where we can bring reporters who we trained up to come and speak about some of the issues on the ground. We're doing that currently with our LGBTQ+ series focused on the anti-homosexuality act in Uganda, where it's close to impossible to publish any queer stories. We worked with a reporter based in Kampala and with a podcaster from Tanzania making a story about his friend in Uganda who had to flee to Kenya.

How do these young producers who you’ve trained benefit besides, of course, getting new technical skills?

Many people in the program come from communities where there aren't that many resources. The radio program allows them to come together and learn new skills, but also to communicate and speak to authority. We've had our reporters go and interview community leaders and find ways to ask questions. Also community radio stations are a place where misinformation can thrive. We also teach about research and fact-based reporting. They learn to come out as leaders and people who have something to say, be critical and question what they see. And also having their names heard on the radio, there's a certain respect that they gain within the community. That wouldn't necessarily be possible without a microphone to kind of give them that sense of power or that sense of being able to make a change.

Radio Workshop in Goma, DRC

Can you outline the contents of your workshops for us?

We have a distinction between our radio training and our podcast training. In our radio training, we'll spend three to five days training youth how to stand up and speak their story, sometimes in one minute about a day they’ll never forget. Then teach them how to turn that into a story with a beginning, middle and end. They learn how to use the equipment; we send them out to do vox pops and how to tie that into a show. We talk about show clocks, finding interesting angles and being critical. At the end, we have produced a show that they’ve created.

The podcasting training is different. It’s quite rigorous,  and we do a deep dive for five to seven days. Or sometimes we train while we’re producing an episode and some of the stories take three to six months to produce. We need these trainees to have some previous experience in reporting. We then spend a significant amount of time on interviewing for emotion and story. We’ll say, we’re not just reporting for information, we're trying to find someone's heart, someone's soul, a way to reach the depths of a person. So that's a different kind of training.

How do you find the young people who participate?

We rely so much on the community radio stations to lead us to young people or young leaders who are already running programs. When it comes to the podcast, we have people pitching us. So we have a lot of people find us on our pitch page, wanting to do this or that story.

Radio Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa

From listening to your podcasts, I can tell you put a focus on quality audio and good sound design. How do you get that professional standard?

That was really intentional from our side. When we were doing our initial research on podcasts in Africa, we asked people, ‘are you listening to any podcasts on the continent?’ They'd be like, ‘no, because the sound is so crap’. We wanted to change that up and get rid of that barrier and see what changes. So we'll have attentive regimes around checking sound and recording it again if need be. Diligence around making sure that you tick all the boxes prior to bringing a mic in front of someone. We'll do as much as we can to really make sure that the audio is great. But we are also making podcasts on the African continent, which, not to generalize, but for the most part, is not a quiet place! We do leave some room to allow for Africa to have its own sonic texture.

Do you find that young people have a different perspective when it comes to some of these issues they tackle than older people do? Something that makes it fresh?

Mostly they're frank, less filtered, and, of course, they're far more connected and in direct contact with the issues that are being spoken about. In our own team, I'm 40, and two other team members over 40, and then the rest of our colleagues are in their twenties. It creates such dynamic conversations and just really expands our thinking and ideas around how to do things. They mock us and we mock them, and it makes for a rich and diverse exchange that I think is fertile ground for creativity.