An Analysis of Community Engagement through Community Radio during the Covid-19 Pandemic amongst Select Communities in Kenya

This study aims to investigate the kind of messages that were disseminated by community radio stations about the Covid-19 pandemic, the audience’s perception towards this information and their confidence in the interventions and control measures that were propagated by these stations. The Health Belief Model was used to inform the study as it focuses on effective health communication that advocates for behaviour change through the provision of information. This study was conducted in two Sifa FM community radio stations in Kenya that is Sifa FM Voi and Sifa FM Marsabit. Data were collected through interview guides, questionnaires, document review and content analysis on radio programmes and advertisements. The target population consisted of the programme developers and hosts of the selected radio stations, their listeners and their radio programmes. Purposive sampling was used to select 12 participants as the KIIs, who included 10 community leaders and two station managers, while random sampling was used to select 100 listeners from Voi in Taita Taveta County and 100 from Marsabit County. A few Covid-19 related programmes were also sampled. The open-ended questions were analyzed using content analysis and the interviews using thematic analysis. The results indicated that the radio stations played a significant role in disseminating COVID-19 related messages through various programmes and that the audience perceived the messages to be informative, especially with regard to preventive measures, transmission of the disease and the symptoms of the disease. This study uses the constructs of HBM as a guide to explain how people changed their behaviour towards behaviour that limited the spread of Covid-19. The study concludes that HBM can be used to study the Covid-19 situation. It suggests that community radio was an appropriate tool that was used to mitigate misinformation and to help the community in selecting healthy behaviours.