U.K. Consumers Urged to Trade In Analog Radios For ‘Radio Amnesty’

Children in Southern Africa could soon benefit from the U.K.’s plan to switch off mainstream terrestrial analog radio by 2015 and replace it with the European DAB terrestrial digital system. Over the last month, a “Radio Amnesty” promotion from the trade group Digital Radio U.K. (DRUK) has promised listeners a discount of 10 percent toward the purchase of a new DAB radio if they trade in their existing analog sets. The traded-in radios will then be sent to Southern African villages and hospitals by the U.S.-based charity, the Children’s Radio Foundation. But a question mark hangs over the ongoing provision of batteries needed to listen.

"The 2015 date is aspirational,” said Ford Ennals, who left Nike to become DRUK’s CEO early this year. “Digital listening is still under 25 percent. But the date is achievable.” As for how African recipients of traded-in radios would get the batteries they need to power their radios, Ennals said: “Batteries are provided with the radios by the Children’s Radio Foundation charity, which is handling the distribution."

The batteries “are being generously donated by Amazon,” a DRUK spokeswoman told us. “Because we're not sure yet how many radios will be handed in and how many of those will be able to be reconditioned for use in Southern Africa, we don’t yet know how many batteries will be needed. However, we are confident that the donation from Amazon is of appropriate magnitude.” Amazon didn’t respond to our queries about how many batteries it would donate and for how long.

When planning for the amnesty began, it was decided that the only radios that would be accepted for donation would be battery-powered receivers, said a spokeswoman for the BBC, which is participating in the promotion. “The reason for this is that many of the radios will be used in villages where there is no electricity,” and any other devices would need to be fully safety-tested, she said. “We were also aware that many devices handed in would probably not have the correct cables. I totally understand that batteries are expensive in Southern Africa and it was therefore essential that we were able to provide batteries by a third party. Amazon kindly agreed to contribute a large number of batteries to this scheme as they are unable to accept any trade-in products due to their online activity only."

BBC has “full confidence” in the Children’s Radio Foundation, the spokeswoman said. “It is not a large charity but it is one of few that can make a difference to children’s education through radio. The radios that we will be collecting will be sent to support more than one of their projects: one initiative is at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Cape Town to establish a hospital radio station. The CRF has been working with a core group of long-term child patients to produce their own radio stories. The donated radios will be made available to children in the wards at the hospital and provide much needed external stimulus and a valuable connection to the world for children and young teens. Once the in-house hospital radio station is established the radios will enable children in the wards to tune in to their own radio station."

Additional radios will be sent to a rural radio initiative in northern KwaZulu-Natal, the BBC spokeswoman said. The children there live in extreme poverty amid high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and malaria, she said. “Some homesteads in this area are very poor and don’t have a single working radio,” she said. “Where families do have radios, adults usually choose the station that is listened to. A donation of radios to children in this area would mean greater opportunity to listen to their local community station and to hear the voices of their peers.”