Jocelyne Josiah: a lifetime of international public service and development work
Caribbean desk From 3A
crossing themes that were involved in it.”
Another co-production involved Ghana and Seychelles on the life of Ghanaian King Prempeh, who the British had exiled to Seychelles and where he and his retinue lived for a number of years. Prempeh was later moved to St Vincent and the Grenadines. “They were able to make linkages with the families, all through a television production.”
Josiah was involved in the evolution of the Zimbabwe Film and Television Institute, which started with a twoweek workshop funded by the Norwegians, to train producers in television production. The Zimbabweans continuously expanded the training until they needed a building to facilitate full-time training. “They came to us to help them to set it up. The Norwegians helped with the equipment and UNESCO sourced all the training and trained trainers. That is one of the reasons I like development work and working with people, working with them from scratch.”
Josiah took a keen interest in the development of community radio, community television, community newspapers, starting with newspapers.
The civil society organisations interested in community media approached UNESCO through their governments. Josiah and others visited the communities, heard about their issues from the people and their leaders and worked out with them the best ways of using community media to try to overcome those problems. UNESCO started with community newspapers, trained a handful of people with basic education in techniques in the production and how to circulate them.
Generally, the response to the community newspapers, she said, was amazing when those producing the community newspapers were interviewed by radio stations and politicians responded to their requests.
From Paris, France, Josiah moved to Kingston, Jamaica to head UNESCO’s Caribbean communication programme. From 1993 to 2004, she was involved in regular radio, television and newspapers through the Caribbean Broadcasting Union, other organisations and interacting with regional governments while trying to push community media.
In Cuba, under her watch, Television Serrana was set up in a remote area in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where people moved on horseback, because residents were not getting signals. With UNESCO’s help, the people built a production studio at the foot of the mountain and trained young people from the area in production techniques. “The concerns of these communities were aired fully for those who could make a defence in their decision-making.”
She also helped Cuba to set up a station at Isla de Juventud because they were getting more signals from the Cayman Islands than from Havana.
Also under Josiah’s watch, UNESCO helped the community television, Gayelle TV, in TT to get underway.
She related, “We set up four radio stations at the four corners of Haiti in the remotest of areas. The Haitian government wanted to improve their communication in those communities because they weren’t getting signals from Port-au-Prince but were getting signals from other countries.
“When we went in, the Americans were very active in Haiti and they didn’t like the president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. They persuaded the people in the villages to carry programmes that were anti-Aristide. Eventually they took them over.”
Josiah opined that unless civil societies are strong enough, the larger commercial and government stations would eat the community stations up.
Other radio community stations set up during Josiah’s tenure were in Dominica, Jamaica, Suriname, TT, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname. All were solar powered to give them sustainability, technically. “In Barbados we helped them to set up a campus radio station, GEB, at Barbados Community College.”
Josiah was instrumental in setting up campus radios and campus televisions in other parts of the world including the Caribbean School of Media and Communications
in Jamaica and a radio station at the Centre for Communication Studies at UG. She was also instrumental in setting up the Creative and Production Training Centre in Jamaica.
Josiah came together with a Latin American colleague who was doing the same work, trained people in production techniques and evaluated their success and challenges in the different countries. “We also had libraries and archives as part of the development of community media.”
Radio Paiwomak
In Guyana, Josiah said, UNESCO tried to explain the concept of community radio, but the government would not listen.
“They were afraid of putting radio in the hands of communities,” she recalled. “Eventually we came to an agreement to set up a radio station in Annai through the National Communications Network (NCN) as an arm of Iwokrama to educate the communities around, on the environment and sustainable development. We trained a group of young people; a local headmaster was the station master. We tried to get the local people from the community involved as much as possible.
“Radio Paiwomak calls itself a community radio but it never functioned as such. They broadcast on one of NCN’s frequencies. The staff, who were supposed to be volunteers, were paid a salary by NCN. Once that happened, it was no longer a community station. One of the positives that came out of volunteering was to train local people in a different technique of radio production that was community based with a lot of community participation that the regular public radio does not have the time to do. The community radio station was supposed to be selfsustainable. That concept was kind of lost in Guyana.”
She noted that AMARC (the International Association of Community Radios) would never include Radio Paiwomak as a member, under the current structure, because it does not fit the criteria. “All the other stations they have put up are branches of NCN like Radio Paiwomak. I have told that to NCN several times. When I was on the board of the Guyana National Broadcasting Authority, I told NCN they should not be calling them community radios because they are not.”
India
After 11 years in Jamaica, Josiah was assigned to India where she was UNESCO’s advisor for communication and information for the six countries of South Asia Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. She was in India from 2004 to 2008 after which she retired from active international public service.
“India was quite an experience. When I went there, India was just getting into community radio,” she recalled. “All these stations were popping up all over the place. India is a big place. Their broadcasting policy had nothing much to say about community radio. The NGOs fought for a policy on community radio until it was developed and introduced with their participation. I was there as a part of the discussions. At my level, I had to advocate for the government, head of the broadcasting commission and other influential people to accept the policy. “By the time I was ready to leave the new technologies, the internet and social media, were beginning to take hold.”
Humanitarian work
When she returned to Guyana, Josiah wanted to experience working on the ground looking up because in the past she had worked at the top looking down. She joined Georgetown D’Urban Park Lions Club and the Girl Guides Association to make her contribution. She had been a girl guide at the BHS.
About five years ago, the Girl Guides set up the Muriel Wright Scholarship programme to encourage more young girls to participate in it and to help some meet their learning needs.
She served her Lions Club as president for a year. She is also involved in the club’s bursary and scholarships programmes which are mainly funded by Chartered Accountancy firm Ram and McRae, as well as its library and reading programme.
When she was president, children were using a plank to get across a trench between Lamaha Springs and Tucville to go to school. “We, Lions, came together and worked with the communities to build a bridge so the children could cross safely to go to school,” she said.
She joined the Lions because, she said, rather than sitting down writing cheques and allowing things to happen, Lions get down into the communities and do it themselves thereby inspiring people.