News

Coronavirus has severely impacted our lives – from pressuring our healthcare to keeping families apart. Though we’ve been persevering through the global pandemic for nearly a year, it is hardly a new ‘normal’. Sierra Leone had its first reported Covid-19 case at the end of March 2020. However, in the first seven months of the…

Welcome to Amplifying Voices! To kick off a new year, we’ve changed some things around here. As of 1 January 2021, our HCR teams in the UK and Pakistan are operating as ‘Amplifying Voices’. We’ve got a new name, new logo, new colours, new website, and new stories! But why the change? Our previous name,…

A couple of weeks ago HCR Pakistan held a competition in a village primary school near Charsadda. The competition got children thinking about sickness and how to prevent it – especially Covid-19. It was community-centred media – but not as we know it

COVID19 has highlighted the vital role of communication for disseminating health and hygiene advice in a crisis, and for building cooperation across diverse populations. Although we have had to adapt working practices to observe physical distancing, community-centred media remains our primary tool in responding to Covid19. We have also provided some emergency funding so our partners…

Soot Semee is helping refugee communities in Northern Uganda to protect children at risk. A large child protection NGO has been working with Soot Semee volunteers to help community members recognise abuse and know how to report it.

Community-centred media helps people facing disadvantage or injustice to speak out and be heard by those in positions of power. Local stories are powerful, as HCR Pakistan’s partner, New Dawn, saw recently when responding to a scam that was hurting low income families. A few years ago in Pakistan, the government started to roll out…

Despite Covid-19, Amplifying Voices’ partner, Community Development Centre, Uganda (CDC) continues to bring communities together. CDC’s Soot Semee project uses community-centred podcasts to overcome physical distancing challenges caused by the pandemic. Physical distancing not only prevents people from seeing loved ones, it also exaggerates the separation between people from different community groups. Barnabas Samuel, from…

With Kenyan schools now unlikely to reopen until January 2021, radio has become an educational life-line for many families across the country.  Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Amani FM, HCR’s partner station in Eastern Kenya, in collaboration with Zizi Afrique Foundation, has been delighting children and parents across Tana Delta, with a variety…

In a world suffering from too many strong people using their strength to enforce their will on others, its really exciting to find this Pakistani youth group who are using their strengths to listen to their community. These young people from a church in the small city of Jauharabad said they had felt despair about…

This is Refugee Week. In Northern Uganda, refugee voices are at forefront of the battle against the problems Covid-19 brings to their communities. We heard about some places where the only information comes through megaphones. After a while this can seem a list of do’s and don’ts and people in those communities say they feel…