Approximately 40 percent of countries categorize homosexuality as illegal. However, refugee status is still granted largely on the basis of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which found that a refugee is a person who has a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. On that basis, few countries allow sexual orientation as grounds for refugee status. Owing to the extraordinary odds of gaining successful refugee status and because lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum seekers are often socially isolated in their search for refugee status, there is a heightened need for non-government organization support networks for these individuals. This research explores social media from four LGBT refugee organizations, largely focused on Africa, to ascertain where the differences and similarities reside in communicating with community members, sharing information, building community and encouraging action.
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After Cyclone Gaja wreaked havoc in Tamil Nadu, a community radio station in Nagapattinam district started an initiative called “Voice of the Vulnerable”. The initiative aims to engage and empower coastal communities with stories of environment and climate change affecting their everyday lives. The radio station also conducts community journalism workshops to train the youth about the various issues in the regions and also ways to report them.
This article critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of strategic communication initiatives to enhance cultures of governance among youth in Northern Ghana. The analysis is embedded within contemporary debates about communication and social change, with particular focus upon dynamics between citizen media development, youth-centred citizen journalism, and processes of community mobilisation and development. Findings suggest that the project has opened up to dynamic, youth-led social change processes, evidenced by the creative, proactive enactment of citizen engagement. Youth changed not only their self-perception around agency and ability to act, but also influenced community development in a variety of ways.
In this paper the authors describe how an educational project was rapidly adapted into a radio education programme after the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone.