Written by Gerry Jackson

Radio journalists broadcasting news about Zimbabwe have turned to texting bulletins via mobile phones in order to beat the censors. After radio signals were blocked by jamming devices, SW Radio Africa decided to text the headlines instead. Journalists say the biggest challenge is compressing the complexity of Zimbabwe's news into 160 characters. But it works, with 100 new subscribers signing up each day.

Zimbabwe is described as having one of the most repressive media environments in the world.

Robert Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, is determined to remain the ‘dear leader’ and at 83 years of age is not exactly turning into a cuddly bunny. I first came up against his brick media wall in 1997.

I’d been working part time with the state broadcaster for years, but made the foolish error of opening the phone lines and allowing people to speak freely, during the first real food riots.

This didn’t go down too well and I was fired.

In 2000 I challenged the government’s broadcasting monopoly in the Supreme Court and won the right to set up the country’s first independent radio station.

It lasted six days and was shut down at gunpoint after Mugabe used his presidential powers to emphasise that the rule of law was just not going to be allowed to exist.

So I gathered together a trusty band of Zimbabwean journalist and we set up SW Radio Africa, just outside London.

It would have made more sense to set up in one of the regional countries like South Africa - but the region has shown a curious lack of support for democratic principles, human rights and press freedom in one of its neighbours.

We were broadcasting quite successfully on shortwave and via the internet for the first three years but the Chinese have moved into Zimbabwe, as they have done in many parts of Africa, and they’re not known for their commitment to human rights and press freedom either.

So with a bit of Chinese technology and training - the jamming began.

It’s focused on the main centres so we still get through to many rural areas but it has pushed us to look at alternative ways of disseminating the news and information we create on a daily basis.

When we started, we had set up our website to stream and archive broadcasts, specifically for the four to five million Zimbabweans who have fled and are living outside the footprint of the broadcast signal.

We also send transcripts of key interviews to an extensive email address list and these get picked up by various organisations and circulated even further.

But currently we’re most excited about our latest endeavour - sending SMS news headlines into Zimbabwe, via mobile phones.

We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway - so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective for any additional donor because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers.

Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect.

We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly. What becomes interesting is what business model to use?

Zimbabweans are far too poor to pay for this service with an unemployment rate of 80% and the highest inflation in the world at 1,593%, and rising.

As we depend on donor funding we have limited resources. Will we soon get to the stage where we’ll have to say no to requests to receive the news?

The other challenge is to précis the complexity of Zimbabwe’s news stories into 160 characters, including spaces.

As the economy goes into meltdown and in-fighting escalates in the ruling party, no simple news comes out of the country.

We’ve also just started podcasting, with the help of a colleague who’s putting our programming into an MP3 format for free. It’s proved surprisingly popular.

What we now know is that you can have the ideas to make your business more effective and improve information delivery, but without the hard cash it’s not going to be easy.