The UNESCO REF Podcast

I. Introduction

Development institutions publish a great deal, and much of what they publish is never fully understood by the people it concerns. Reports appear, communiqués are issued and programmes are launched, yet the reasoning behind a policy often fails to reach the citizen it is meant to serve. The difficulty is seldom a shortage of information. More often it is a shortage of the conditions under which information becomes understanding: sufficient time, adequate context, and a speaker whom the listener can identify and hold to account.

This paper argues that the long-form spoken conversation, recorded, transcribed and preserved, supplies those conditions with particular force in the African setting. The argument rests on history. For most of the continent's past, knowledge of law, lineage, medicine, statecraft and belief was held and transmitted orally, by specialists whose standing depended on accuracy, memory and public performance. A medium that restores the spoken word to the centre of public reasoning therefore addresses African audiences in a register they have long had reason to trust.

The paper proceeds in ten parts. Sections II to IV establish the authority and method of oral knowledge. Sections V and VI consider broadcasting and language in Nigeria. Sections VII and VIII assess podcasting, its promise and its risks. Section IX sets out principles for an institutional archive in sound, and Section X concludes.

II. The Authority of the Spoken Word

Scholarship on African oral literature, beginning in earnest with Ruth Finnegan's survey of 1970 and extended by Isidore Okpewho and others, has shown that orality on the continent is a complete system of knowledge in its own right. Its forms are numerous: genealogical recitation, praise poetry, proverb, epic, court narrative and divinatory verse. Each has conventions of composition and performance, and each is delivered before an audience able to judge whether it has been rendered correctly.

Among the Yoruba, oriki record the attributes and deeds of persons, lineages and towns. Karin Barber's study of oriki in a Yoruba town showed that these texts are not fixed monuments. They are recited, contested and extended, and through them a community conducts an argument with its own past. The Ifa divination system, which UNESCO proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005 and inscribed on the Representative List in 2008, preserves a very large corpus of verse that practitioners commit to memory over years of training.

These traditions share a principle that modern institutional communication has tended to lose. Knowledge gains authority when it is spoken by an identifiable person, in public, before listeners competent to question it. In this sense the spoken word has always been an instrument of accountability as well as of transmission.

III. Custodians of Memory

Many African societies did not leave the preservation of spoken knowledge to chance. They created offices for it. In the Mande world of West Africa, hereditary specialists in speech, known in French as griots and in Mande languages by terms such as jeli, served as genealogists, historians, advisers and spokesmen to rulers. The epic of Sundiata, founder of the Mali empire, survives because such specialists transmitted it across many centuries; the version published by Djibril Tamsir Niane in 1960 was taken down from a master of that tradition.

In the kingdoms of the Nigerian region, comparable functions were performed by court historians, royal drummers whose instruments reproduced the tones of speech, and chiefs entrusted with the remembrance of succession and precedent. The talking drum of the Yoruba, able to render praise names and proverbs in sound, is an especially clear example of an institution designed to carry precise verbal meaning across distance.

The significance of these offices for the present argument is institutional. Oral knowledge was reliable where it was attached to a recognised role, governed by standards of accuracy, and performed before a public. Its weakness lay where those supports failed: with the death of a custodian, the collapse of a court, or the dispersal of a community. Amadou Hampâté Bâ, the Malian scholar, is widely remembered for warning UNESCO in 1960 that in Africa the death of an elder could mean the loss of an entire library. The warning was a call to record.

IV. Orality as Evidence

For much of the twentieth century, historians trained in documentary methods treated oral accounts with suspicion. The work of Jan Vansina changed that position. In Oral Tradition as History, published in 1985 after decades of field research, Vansina argued that oral traditions are historical sources that can be examined critically, in the same way as written documents, provided that attention is paid to how they were transmitted, by whom, for what purpose and with what likely distortions.

This methodological shift matters for any institution that proposes to record conversation as part of the public record. A recorded interview is a primary source. Its value as evidence depends on knowing who spoke, in what capacity, on what date and under what conditions, and on being able to compare what was said with what was later done. The disciplines that historians developed for oral tradition, including the identification of the speaker, the recording of context and the preservation of the original, translate directly into standards for a modern spoken archive.

Walter Ong's broader comparison of oral and literate cultures adds a further point. Spoken communication is participatory and situated: it addresses a present audience and draws meaning from the occasion. When speech is recorded, it acquires the permanence of writing while retaining much of the immediacy of performance. Ong described this condition as a secondary orality, characteristic of the electronic age. Long-form audio is perhaps its fullest expression.

V. Broadcasting and the Making of a Nigerian Public

Broadcasting extended the reach of the spoken word in Nigeria without abandoning its character. Wired rediffusion services in Lagos during the 1930s relayed programmes to subscribers. The Nigerian Broadcasting Service, established in 1951, became the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation later in the decade, and regional services followed. In October 1959, Western Nigeria Television in Ibadan began transmission and is widely recorded as the first television station in Africa.

Radio in particular became the medium of the nation. It carried news across linguistic and regional boundaries, it reached communities that the press could not, and it gave Nigerians a common experience of public events at the moment they occurred. Paddy Scannell's work on broadcast talk describes how radio and television create a shared everyday world for listeners who never meet. In a federation of Nigeria's size and diversity, that function carried considerable civic weight.

International broadcasting reinforced the pattern. The BBC began broadcasting in Hausa in 1957, and its Pidgin service, launched in 2017, addressed one of the most widely understood languages in the country. Such services demonstrated that audiences would give sustained attention to serious spoken content when it was offered in a language and register they recognised as their own.

UNESCO acknowledged the continuing importance of this tradition when its General Conference proclaimed World Radio Day in 2011, a decision subsequently endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly. The proclamation affirmed that the voice, carried widely and at low cost, remains one of the most accessible means of public communication available to any society.

VI. Language, Plurality and Reach

Nigeria is home to more than five hundred languages. This plurality is a cultural inheritance of great value and a practical challenge for every institution that seeks to communicate nationally. Written communication in English reaches an educated minority with ease and a wider public with difficulty. Spoken communication, especially when it is accompanied by translation and transcription, can travel further.

For this reason the podcast's commitment to transcripts in English with a French translation should be understood as a first step. English and French are the principal international working languages of the African Union and of most continental institutions, and publishing in both places Nigerian discussion within reach of francophone neighbours in West and Central Africa. The same infrastructure of transcription and translation can, in later seasons, support editions or summaries in Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Nigerian Pidgin, extending the programme to audiences for whom a national conversation conducted only in English remains partly closed.

Transcription has a further purpose. It converts sound into searchable text that can be cited, indexed and preserved. It also makes the programme accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens, and to anyone who prefers to read. A spoken archive that is not transcribed is available only to those with the time and means to listen to it in full.

VII. The Return of the Long Form

Broadcasting imposed a discipline of its own, which was the schedule. Every conversation had to fit its allotted time, and as commercial pressure increased in many countries, public discussion was compressed into shorter segments. The extended interview, once a mainstay of public-service broadcasting, became less common.

Podcasting has reversed this compression. Released from the schedule, a conversation can run for as long as its subject requires. The listener may pause it, return to it and share it. Published openly, it remains available long after its first release. These properties have produced an international revival of the long-form interview, with audiences that in many markets are younger than those of traditional broadcasting.

The economics of the medium are also significant for Africa. Audio requires far less data than video, plays on modest mobile handsets and can be downloaded for later listening where connectivity is intermittent. In a country with one of the youngest populations in the world, and where the mobile telephone is the principal means of access to the internet, audio is among the most practical forms of rich media through which an institution can reach young people at scale.

The long form also changes the kind of knowledge that can be communicated. Short formats reward assertion. Extended conversation permits explanation: the history of a decision, the alternatives that were considered, the evidence on which a target rests and the conditions on which success depends. For a development institution whose programmes require public understanding in order to succeed, this is the most important property of the medium.

VIII. Risks of the Spoken Medium

A responsible account must also consider the risks. The informality and intimacy that make audio persuasive can make it a vehicle for misinformation. Voice notes circulated on messaging platforms have carried rumour and false health advice in Nigeria, as elsewhere, precisely because a voice is more readily trusted than an anonymous text. Advances in synthetic speech now make it possible to imitate a known voice with increasing fidelity, which raises the cost of failing to establish authoritative sources.

Three safeguards follow. First, provenance: every edition should be published from an identifiable institutional source, with the speakers named and the date and place of recording stated. Second, verification: factual claims of consequence should be checked before release and, where they cannot be confirmed, attributed to the speaker. Third, permanence: the authoritative version should be preserved by the institution itself, so that any altered or misattributed copy can be compared with the original. These safeguards apply to the modern spoken archive the same discipline that the custodians of oral tradition applied to theirs.

IX. Principles for an Archive in Sound

If the argument of this paper is accepted, an institution committed to education and development should treat the recorded conversation as a publication in its own right. Six principles follow, and they govern The UNESCO REF Podcast.

The first is identification. Each speaker is named and described by role, and the circumstances of recording are stated. The second is accuracy. Claims of consequence are verified, and errors are corrected openly with a dated note. The third is fairness. Where an edition concerns a party who is not present, that party is offered a reasonable opportunity to respond.

The fourth is legibility. Every edition is transcribed in English, with a French translation, and published with notes and chapter markers. The fifth is preservation. Master recordings and transcripts are held by the UNESCO REF Media Centre, consistent with the guidance of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, which recognises sound recordings as documentary heritage requiring deliberate care. The sixth is openness. Editions are published freely, without charge to the listener, so that the record is available to every citizen and researcher.

X. Conclusion

The UNESCO REF Podcast belongs to a tradition far older than the technology that carries it. It asks those who lead public life to do what the custodians of African knowledge have long done: to speak in their own voice, at length, before a public entitled to listen and to question. Recorded, transcribed and preserved, such speech becomes evidence for historians, information for citizens and an account to which institutions can be held. By placing the long-form conversation within its archive, UNESCO REF seeks continuity with that tradition and a deeper public understanding of the work of development.

References

1. Barber, K. (1991). I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute.
2. Finnegan, R. (1970). Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
3. Niane, D. T. (1960). Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue. Paris: Présence Africaine.
4. Okpewho, I. (1992). African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
5. Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.
6. Scannell, P. (1996). Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell.
7. UNESCO (2003). Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Paris: UNESCO.
8. UNESCO (2011). Proclamation of World Radio Day. Records of the General Conference, 36th Session. Paris: UNESCO.
9. UNESCO, Memory of the World Programme (2002). General Guidelines to Safeguard Documentary Heritage. Paris: UNESCO.
10. Vansina, J. (1985). Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

I. The Communication Deficit

Citizens cannot take part in a programme they do not understand. Development interventions in education, agriculture and enterprise often fall short of their potential because the people for whom they were designed do not know of them, do not understand how they work, or do not believe they will be delivered. The cost is measured in places left unfilled, opportunities left unclaimed and a public scepticism that grows each time a programme is announced and its progress is never explained.

The usual instruments of institutional communication are the press release, the launch ceremony and the advertising campaign. They are well suited to announcement and poorly suited to explanation. They tell the public that something exists. They rarely tell the public how it works, who is responsible for it, what it will require of participants and why it deserves confidence. Where a programme asks citizens to commit time, money or effort, these are the questions on which participation depends.

II. Trust as a Condition of Delivery

A scheme that asks young people to commit years of study, or families to invest in a new agricultural enterprise, asks them to accept risk on the strength of an institution's word. Where that word is doubted, participation falls, and the programme underperforms regardless of the quality of its design.

The OECD's work on trust in public institutions identifies two broad sources of confidence. The first is competence, expressed through responsiveness and reliability. The second is values, expressed through integrity, openness and fairness. Communication cannot substitute for competence; a programme must deliver. But openness is itself a value that the public weighs, and an institution that explains its decisions fully, and accepts questions about them, provides evidence of the integrity on which trust depends.

Of the means available, the willingness of those responsible to be questioned in public is the least common. A leader who explains a programme at length, in an unscripted conversation, and who answers difficult questions on the record, offers the public an assurance that advertising cannot provide.

III. The Right to Know

Public access to information is a recognised right with firm foundations in international, regional and Nigerian law. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, commits states under target 16.10 to ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms. Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights guarantees every individual the right to receive information, and the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa, adopted by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in 2019, elaborates that right in detail.

In Nigeria, the Freedom of Information Act 2011 established a statutory right of access to records held by public institutions and required proactive publication of information about their functions and activities. UNESCO's own normative work points in the same direction. The Windhoek Declaration of 1991, adopted at a UNESCO seminar on the African press, led to the proclamation of World Press Freedom Day, and the Windhoek+30 Declaration of 2021 affirmed information as a public good.

These instruments share an underlying principle: information about public action belongs to the public. The principle is not satisfied by the mere existence of documents. It is satisfied when citizens can find, understand and use what is being done in their name. An institution that serves the public interest has good reason to adopt the spirit of these instruments in its own communication, whether or not every provision applies to it as a matter of law.

IV. The Long Form as Accountability

The long-form conversation has four properties that suit it to accountability. It is extended, so that answers cannot be reduced to slogans. It is sequential, so that a claim made early can be tested later. It is recorded, so that what was said remains available to be compared with what is done. And it is personal, so that responsibility attaches to a named speaker rather than to an anonymous institution.

These properties change the incentives of those who speak. A leader who knows that a conversation will be published in full, transcribed and archived speaks with greater care, makes fewer promises that cannot be kept and explains more of the reasoning behind each decision. The recording becomes a discipline on the institution as well as a service to the public.

For the listener, the long form restores a relationship that mass communication has weakened. It allows a citizen to hear, at length and without heavy mediation, how a programme is understood by those who lead it. It assumes that the listener can follow an argument, and that assumption is itself a form of respect.

V. Lessons from Public-Service Broadcasting

The tradition of public-service broadcasting offers an established model for an institution that wishes to communicate in the public interest. John Reith, the first Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation, set out in Broadcast Over Britain in 1924 a conception of broadcasting as a public service, and the formula most associated with him, that broadcasting should inform, educate and entertain, has shaped public broadcasters across the Commonwealth, including in Nigeria.

Three lessons from that tradition apply directly. The first concerns editorial independence: the credibility of a public-service programme depends on the audience's confidence that its content is governed by editorial standards rather than by the interests of its owner. The second concerns universality: a public-service programme is made for every citizen and is offered on equal terms. The third concerns published standards: the leading public broadcasters set out their editorial guidelines openly, so that their audiences can judge whether those guidelines are observed.

An institutional podcast cannot claim the full independence of a statutory broadcaster, and it should not pretend to. It can, however, adopt published standards, apply them consistently and invite scrutiny of its adherence to them. The editorial charter of The UNESCO REF Podcast, published on this page, is intended to serve that purpose.

VI. Voice as Diplomacy

The same instrument serves an international purpose. Joseph Nye's account of soft power describes the capacity of a society or institution to shape preferences through attraction and credibility rather than coercion. Nicholas Cull's analysis of public diplomacy distinguishes several of its practices, among them listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchange and international broadcasting. A long-form podcast that hosts foreign partners, explains international cooperation to domestic audiences and presents Nigerian institutions to the world engages several of these practices at once.

A recorded conversation with the head of a partner institution explains the partnership to the citizens it is intended to benefit, places the partner's commitments on the public record, and presents the Nigerian institution as a capable host of serious dialogue. Development is increasingly conducted through partnership between governments, institutions and enterprises across borders, and such partnerships rest on mutual understanding that sustained conversation helps to build.

UNESCO's own history gives this view particular weight. The report of the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, published in 1980 as Many Voices, One World, argued that a more balanced international flow of information depended on the capacity of developing societies to speak for themselves. A programme produced in Abuja and distributed internationally is a contemporary expression of that aspiration.

VII. An Instrument for the SIP-ALPHA Portfolio

UNESCO REF conducts its programmes through the SIP-ALPHA framework, its flagship and the point from which its work originates. The portfolio includes the Young Women in Agriculture initiative, which is designed to train and certify twelve million young women in agriculture; the Educational Financial Facility Scheme, which opens access to international higher education; and the VOICE Initiative in artificial intelligence and digital enterprise, among other programmes. Each depends on public participation, and therefore on public understanding.

The podcast serves this portfolio by explaining it in detail. It brings the leaders and partners of each programme to the microphone to set out what the programme is, how it is governed, what it asks of participants and how its results will be known. In this way institutional intention becomes public knowledge, and public knowledge supports the confidence on which participation depends.

The four editions of Season One follow this design. They address the economic empowerment of women in agriculture, the international recognition of Nigerian qualifications, the national architecture of the Sustainable Development Goals and the financing of higher education. In each case the public has a direct interest, and the guest has direct responsibility.

VIII. Safeguards Against Capture

Any programme produced by an institution about its own work faces an obvious risk: that explanation will become promotion, and that difficult questions will be avoided. The value of the programme to the public, and therefore to the institution, depends on managing that risk openly.

Four safeguards are adopted. First, the editorial charter is published, so that the standards to which the programme holds itself are known. Second, guests may review transcripts for factual accuracy, while final editorial decisions rest with the Media Centre, which separates correction of fact from approval of content. Third, the programme commits to right of reply where an edition concerns a party not present. Fourth, corrections are made openly and dated, so that the record shows what was changed and why. Over time, the inclusion of independent voices, including critics and external experts, will be the clearest evidence that these safeguards are observed.

IX. Measuring Public Value

A programme that claims a public purpose should be prepared to show whether it achieves one. Download figures alone are an inadequate measure, since they record reach without recording understanding or trust. The UNESCO REF Media Centre will therefore assess the programme against a broader set of indicators.

These include reach, measured by listens and transcript readings across platforms and regions; completion, measured by the proportion of each edition that listeners hear, as an indication of sustained engagement; enquiry, measured by questions and applications to the programmes discussed in the weeks following each edition; citation, measured by references to editions in the press, in academic work and in partner communications; and correction, measured by the number and nature of corrections issued, as a test of the charter's operation. Findings will inform the design of subsequent seasons.

X. Conclusion

Public leadership depends on the accountable use of the voice. Where information is plentiful and trust is limited, the institutions best placed to deliver development will be those that explain themselves most fully and accept public questions most readily. The UNESCO REF Podcast is founded on that conviction. It gives the public a durable record of how the institution reasons and acts, and it gives the institution a disciplined means of earning the trust on which its work depends.

References

1. African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (2019). Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa. Banjul: ACHPR.
2. Cull, N. J. (2009). Public Diplomacy: Lessons from the Past. Los Angeles: Figueroa Press.
3. Federal Republic of Nigeria (2011). Freedom of Information Act 2011. Abuja: Federal Government Printer.
4. International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (1980). Many Voices, One World. Paris: UNESCO.
5. Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: PublicAffairs.
6. OECD (2017). Trust and Public Policy: How Better Governance Can Help Rebuild Public Trust. Paris: OECD Publishing.
7. Organisation of African Unity (1981). African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. Nairobi: OAU.
8. Reith, J. C. W. (1924). Broadcast Over Britain. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
9. UNESCO (2021). Windhoek+30 Declaration: Information as a Public Good. Paris: UNESCO.
10. United Nations (2015). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1.