On a humid afternoon in North Kivu, a group of farmers crowd into a low, corrugated-roof community hall, passing around basic feature phones as a young facilitator replays a Jambo Radio podcast on shifting rainfall patterns and the economics of oil extraction in Africa.
The audio cuts, and the questions begin: a few sharp, several hesitant, many shaped by longstanding myths about who profits from extraction and what it means for their land.
Patricia Kasoki listens closely. She asks follow-ups, redirects assumptions, and invites elders to share what past seasons looked like, before the forests thinned, before heavy rains became erratic, before conflict moved into the hills.
Badilika, the radio programme she leads on Jambo Radio, follows this style. Field conversations shape content. Content cycles back into field conversations. The loop becomes a form of verification, a localised newsroom rooted in lived experience.
“An informed community is a resilient community,” she tells the farmers, her tone firm but warm. The line lands with weight. In a region shaped by contested resources, displacement, and unpredictable weather, information is no longer abstract. It is a survival tool.
Recognition by way of climate award
This approach helped Jambo Radio secure one of the 2025 Gender Just Climate Solutions Awards in the non-technical solutions category. The awards recorded more than 2,300 registrations this year. According to organisers, the tenth anniversary edition underscores a decade of documenting grassroots climate leadership.
For Kasoki, however, the recognition marks a continuation, not a conclusion. Born in 1996 in eastern DRC, she grew up amid militia activity, land disputes, and resource extraction. The inequalities she saw pushed her into citizen movements, women’s collectives, and grassroots organising while she was still in her teens.
Her early work in Kanyabayonga, supporting rural women navigating land rights and food insecurity, shaped her understanding of environmental justice long before she entered media.
Her media voice developed in parallel. In 2022, she received the Georges Atkins Communication Award from Farm Radio International for a programme amplifying rural women’s land rights under climate and conflict stress. That same year, she co-founded Jambo Radio with Béatrice Mbuyi and Joseph Tsongo, believing that community and indigenous media could counter misinformation and strengthen environmental literacy in the Congo Basin.
Today, Jambo Radio operates as a multilingual platform combining radio broadcasts, online podcasts, listener clubs, and moderated debates. Its power lies in translating complex issues, mining contracts, deforestation patterns, and early-warning systems into accessible explanations in local languages.
EU funding
The newest extension of that mission is Jambo-Lab. Launched in August 2025 and supported by youth empowerment funding from the European Union, the SMS-based service delivers short lessons on sustainable agriculture, natural-resource rights, and climate-risk alerts. It works on basic phones, making it accessible in areas where internet penetration is low but mobile access remains high.
Over the past three months, around 100 farmers in North Kivu have joined the system. They join more than 3,000 already using the platform to learn, report challenges, and request information. The model is simple but deliberate: short, actionable updates paired with feedback from in-person listening sessions and community-defined indicators.
This hybrid ecosystem, radio, SMS tools, and face-to-face dialogue, reflects a broader continental trend. Across Africa, citizen media collectives are stepping into information gaps left by under-resourced public agencies.
Radio services elsewhere on the continent
In Malawi, community radio networks now help households interpret cyclone warnings. In Ghana, youth podcasters unpack energy reforms for urban listeners. In Kenya, participatory forest-monitoring groups use local radio to track land-use conflicts.
Jambo Radio’s integration of multiple communication layers within one platform makes it one of Central Africa’s most comprehensive climate information initiatives.
The impact is visible well beyond the hall in North Kivu. According to the 2025 Gender Just Climate Solutions report, Jambo Radio has helped communities interpret climate signals to anticipate six extreme-weather events in 2024, reducing agricultural losses by 60%. A podcast series encouraged the conservation of 5,000 hectares of primary forest and led 1,200 families to adopt sustainable farming practices. Listener clubs have trained 25 local radio hosts, enabling five other stations to replicate similar programmes, reaching over 8,000 additional listeners.
Favourable gender bias
Women are central to these shifts as 65% of local experts featured on the platform are women, farmers, healers, and community leaders. Forty-five women have secured legal land titles covering 180 hectares. Twenty-five have been trained as gender-based violence focal points, building a local safety net against abuse and discrimination. Younger women now support elders with digital tools while preserving traditional ecological knowledge.
A “community and Indigenous multimedia” methodology guide produced by the Jambo Radio team has been distributed to 15 radio stations across the country, helping replicate the model in other conflict-affected regions.
Kasoki summarises the philosophy behind this work simply: “We are rebuilding resilience with words and phones.”
The award places Jambo Radio in the company of two other 2025 winners. One is from Bolivia, where indigenous women from the Uru Team restored a polluted lake using 6,000 recycled plastic bottles and 5,000 ‘totora’ plants, cutting water contamination by 30%, according to lab tests. In Central America, a Nicaraguan women-led initiative is building an observatory documenting the experiences of climate-displaced youth and women across the Caribbean Coast.
According to Mwahanamisi Singano, a longstanding Women and Gender Constituency focal point and one of the architects of the Gender Just Climate Solutions programme, these projects collectively dismantle the stereotype that women facing climate pressures are passive victims.
“We have seen women innovating with improved seeds, with energy access, with technology, with new ways of raising awareness,” she explained. “They are not sitting there waiting to be helped.”
She adds that over ten years, documenting such solutions has shifted global debates.
“Most negotiators have lost the argument that ‘we don’t know where the solutions are.’ You can now point to them and say: these are the solutions we want you to scale up, and these are the women whose leadership must be supported.”
Singano also emphasises that the programme’s most significant impact has been inspiring women to replicate what they see. “If women in Togo can do this, then it is also possible for us in Uganda,” she explained.
COP30 visibility
This pattern has strengthened cross-border learning networks and elevated community evidence in climate-policy advocacy.
Yet she also cautions against the co-option of grassroots work by profit-driven models: “We see a trend where local solutions are used to reinforce the same extractive system. I hope the next phase remains grounded in community leadership, resisting those models.”
At COP30, the three winning projects received financial support, mentorship, and skills training organised by CTCN, WECF, and the Women and Gender Constituency, tools designed to help them scale while protecting their grassroots ethos.
For Kasoki, the award adds momentum to her expanding work portfolio.
Beyond Jambo Radio and Badilika, she serves as a democracy ambassador after participating in continental dialogues in Cape Verde. She often argues that young Congolese women are not only affected by conflict and climate shocks; they are central to rebuilding social and environmental systems. “We know our role, and we act accordingly,” she says.
(c) bird story agency
