Connecting the Unconnected: Empowerment through Community Media

In an overview of the Ford Foundation's Advancing Public Interest Media sponsored projects, there exists a clear narrative of empowerment professed by most of the grantees. Whether this empowerment is to come through workshops or a more direct implementation of community media, in the form of community radio for example, this theme consistently runs across the most varied projects. This theme of empowerment is predicated upon the importance of widespread information dissemination and distribution possibilities. The media-centered nature of these projects suggests that it is through information and communications technology that empowerment will come. To control and employ media is, in turn, to control information.