station and 45 percent report listening to national public radio.<sup>10</sup> Only 13 households report listening to religious radio, and only 176 to private commercial radio (about 4 percent of the sample).<sup>11</sup> These listening preferences reflect the availability of stations (as discussed above) and are consistent with what broadcast media experts have contended: poor households in rural Africa prefer to listen to local radio stations because their programming conforms better to household tastes and linguistic preferences than do broadcasts from radios headquartered outside of their region (Buckley et al, 2008).

We have shown that community radio stations carry significantly more health and education programing, and that households listen to them. Why, however, should access to a larger _number_ of community radio stations increase exposure to the relevant programming? People listen to one radio station at a time. If they routinely tune into only one station, additional stations would not increase their exposure to educational programming. Alternately, if people switch stations to find their preferred programming, the availability of multiple stations could enable them to _tune out_ health and education programming in order to find entertainment programming on other stations. Our survey data support the opposite mechanism, however: households listen to radio precisely to hear news and information about public affairs.

The survey asked respondents to indicate how important it is to them to listen to each of the following types of radio programs: on music, sports, news and public affairs, among other categories. Radio is the only source of information about the outside world for most households. Consistent with this, news and public affairs was the type of programming to which households were most likely to attach the highest level of importance (“very important/I listen a lot every day”): 56 and 48 percent of respondents cite these as very important, compared to 40 percent and 25 percent, respectively, who say the same for music and sports. Furthermore, respondents who indicate that they prefer news and public affairs programming are also significantly more likely to listen to community radio stations.

Given the programming preferences of households, more community radio stations are likely to increase household access to public interest programming. If people strongly prefer a particular type of programming, if different stations (e.g., community radio stations) are more likely to broadcast that programming, and if those stations vary in the exact timing and content of that programming, then more stations give more households the opportunity to listen to the programs that they prefer. That is, at any given time, the likelihood that at least one station is broadcasting the type of public-interest programming that a household in the village finds valuable is higher in villages with access to more community radio stations.

Because of the features of the radio market in Benin, the type of public-interest programming carried and the distribution of consumer preferences for such programming, we examine the impact of variation in the number of community radio stations that reach villages. The next section argues that this variation in access is exogenous to other village characteristics that also matter for our outcomes of interest.

> 10 “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 prefer.

> 11 Even among the 176 that report listening to some private commercial radio, 111 also report listening to at least one other public or community radio station.

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