News From Afghanistan

The iMedia-assisted pro­jects imple­mented by Media Sup­port Part­ner­ship Afgh­anistan (MSPA) have come to the end of their first phase. Funding applic­a­tions have been sub­mitted to con­tinue with the Mahaal radio fea­ture news agency, Talking Books and the Straight Talk Youth pro­gramme. See www.mspa.org.af

The Hel­mand Radio drama has been a par­tic­ular suc­cess, with the local scriptwriters working remotely in Hel­mand province receiving visits from Editor Rah­matullah Basharat, along with tele­phone support.

Much time and energy has been devoted to Mobile Mahaal – a system whereby news can be accessed through Afghanistan’s mobile phone net­work. It has proven to be a much harder task than anti­cip­ated, involving gov­ern­ment agen­cies, mobile phone oper­ators and cut­ting edge tech­no­logy to keep the cost of the ser­vice low. How­ever, once the tech­nic­al­ities are cracked, a system will be in place that can be rep­lic­ated to provide much enhanced inter­active com­mu­nic­a­tion for the 10 mil­lion plus mobile phone sub­scribers in Afghanistan.