The UK aid agency features Internews work responding to the Pakistan earthquake in its magazine ’Developments’

In an article entitled ’News You can Use’, reporter Louise Tickle profiled Internews’s Pakistan Emergency Information Project (PEIP), funded by DfID in December 2005 to provide a local information loop to the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless in last October’s earthquake in the North West Frontier Province and Kashmir.

’Developments’ is distributed to 100,000 aid and development workers in Britain and around the world.

PEIP created a team of journalists on the ground who produce a daily hour-long radio program called Jezba-e Tameer which is distributed to some 17 radio stations in and around the earthquake zone.

Some seven stations are newly created since the earthquake. Authorities, recognising the need for local media to inform populations about reconstruction and distribution of vital goods, responded to advocacy by Internews and other NGOs on the ground and granted emergency broadcast licenses.

Independent radio flourished within a space of weeks for the first time in parts of NWFP and Kashmir as Pakistan’s commercial radio networks set up local stations in the affected area.

The Developments article listed some of the practical outcomes which the new local information loop had achieved to improve conditions for earthquake victims, and increase transparency of actions among international aid agencies and Pakistani government officials.

During the winter, for example, over a dozen people were burnt to death inside their refugee tents. When reporters on the Jezba-e Tameer team investigated, they discovered that displaced people were afraid mosquitoes would spread disease and so were coating the fabric of their tents with kerosene, creating an enormous fire risk. Reports put out over local radios set the picture right and the fire deaths dropped off. In another case, people in the temporary camps were puzzled by the bottled water which the UN had distributed to provide potable water, as they had never seen bottled water. Believing it to be unfit for human consumption, they used the bottled water to wash with and drank from the rivers, resulting in widespread incidence of illness. Again, it was the right information put out over a local network of radios which made the difference, increasing acceptance of the bottled water.