Fourteen of the 21 community radio stations in the sample depend on funds from foreign donors and three on funds from non-governmental organizations. Regardless of funding source, all of them describe the provision of information on health and education as a ―very important‖ objective. Consistent with this, the average number of health programs reported by station managers is large (138) and more than three times greater than for public or private commercial radio. Hence, access to a higher number of community radio stations is likely to be associated with exposure to more information about health issues.

To measure the number of radio stations to which households have access, enumerators first asked village-level key informants to list which radio stations they were able to receive. The enumerators also used their own transistor radios to verify and expand on this, if they received additional signals. We did not ask enumerators or village informants to describe the type of radio station or the nature of its programming. Instead, the radio codes from the village survey were matched with the radio survey data to examine the nature of programming available to the village.

Since community radio stations have low signal strength, no single station is accessible to more than a few villages in our sample. However, because the number of community broadcasters is large, at least one community signal is accessible to 93 percent of our sampled villages. Only a few villages in our sample (23 percent) have access to private commercial radio. Although private radio has greater signal strength, it is concentrated in the southern communes of Benin, outside our study area. Government-owned public radio has several relay transmitters allowing it to cover most of the villages in our sample (92 percent) with uniform programming. The information from religious stations is less reliable (for example, in the case of signal strength). However, only 13 respondents identified a religious station as their most preferred broadcaster.

The number of community radios to which villages have access ranges from zero to seven stations, averaging 2.4 and with a standard deviation of 1.5. All but 20 villages in the sample receive strong signals from one or more relayers of the national broadcaster and nearly all villages (175) have access to both a community radio station and national public radio. About 23 percent of villages have access to private commercial and 34 percent to religious radio stations.

Of the 3828 households that listen to some radio, 64 percent report listening to at least one community radio station and 45 percent report listening to national public radio.<sup>11</sup> Only 176 report listening to private commercial radio.<sup>12</sup> These preferences are consistent with availability (few households have access to private commercial radio), and with claims of broadcast media experts that the programming of national broadcasters conforms less well to the tastes and linguistic preferences of poor households in rural Africa compared to local radio stations (Buckley et al, 2008).

The observations drawn from the survey are not contaminated by noise from other mass media. Especially in the study area in northern Benin, radio is essentially the only media to which most citizens have access. Twenty-five percent of respondents to the nationally representative Afrobarometer (2005) survey of Benin report that their household owns a television. In the sample here, of 4200 households from northern Benin, only eight percent own a television, but 84 percent

> 11 ―Listenership‖ data was gathered by simply asking households to name the station they listen to and then having our investigating team post-code the response for type of radio. We did not directly prompt the household to categorize what _type_ of radio they like listening to.

> 12 Even among these 176 that report listening to some private commercial radio, only 67 report listening _only_ to commercial radio; the rest listen as well to at least one other public or community radio station.

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