Give us a brief overview of Oroko Radio
Oroko Radio is a not-for-profit community radio station, creating a platform for creative communities in Africa and the Diaspora, that connects, inspires and empowers local, national and international artists of different disciplines through conversation and collaboration. We have a live broadcast with shows running from Tuesday to Friday, from around 250 active residents based all over the world. Besides our regular radio programming, we also organize and curate offline events such as radio pop ups, DJ workshops, exhibitions and club nights.
Oroko is based in Accra, Ghana with a focus on the diaspora spread around the world. What prompted you to create a station with this focus?
There’s so much diversity in the African musical landscape, with so many different genres from various corners of the continent and yet some people are quick to jump to only afrobeats and amapiano when talking about “African music”. There’s singeli, there’s highlife, there’s gnawa, there’s DJs playing techno (which is rooted in Black culture), there’s DJs with heavy metal shows - you can find it all out there and in diaspora communities. It’s been great to be able to platform a very wide spectrum with shows ranging from punk to ambient jazz and from gengetone to dembow. The music world still tends to be Euro- and US-centric, keeping a heavy focus on those DJs and musicians and overlooking talent based in the so-called “global South”. A very important statement made by one of our founders gives clear context - “the aim is to provide an avenue to dispel misconceptions about what it means to be African or an African artist, taking advantage of a global network and reach to create more opportunities for local artists in Accra and beyond”.
Due to this focus you have hosts/residents spread around the world. In how many cities and countries would you say you have hosts?
Our residents are based in about 130 different cities spread out over 20-some countries, with the majority being in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya.
Walk us through what it's actually like coordinating a global radio station across multiple time zones. What does a typical day look like for you?
Because our team - just like the residents - live in different timezones, we always work in the GMT timezone to avoid any confusion. Monday is always my busiest day - I do Oroko Radio part-time and tend to do most of my work from Monday to Wednesday, so I first check up on any emails that came through over the weekend. Then I check all the submissions that came in; did anybody miss their deadline, is everything submitted correctly, etc. Once that’s done, I fill up any vacant slots with guest mixes, specials, re-runs or extra shows - and then it’s time to upload everything into our radio software and get it all published on our website. On Mondays we also archive all the previous week’s shows to get them ready for playback on our Mixcloud and website. Depending on which projects or events I’m working on, I finish the day by creating a clear overview of tasks and to do’s for the week ahead.
What are the biggest practical challenges of running a station where your team and hosts are scattered across the world?
It runs quite smoothly - I think having very clear communication and being accessible for questions and enquiries helps a lot. There used to be some confusion around the deadline, as everybody is so scattered across the world. At some point I decided to just let the deadline run until midnight in the GMT timezone and that pretty much solved that issue. As for our team - we have frequent meetings where we keep each other up to date of what we’re working on. While working in a small team of three to five people can be challenging at times, one clear advantage is the ease of communication and cross-collaboration compared to larger teams.
How do you handle scheduling when your hosts are literally living in different days?
Once a resident joins the roster and is onboarded, they are able to see their schedule for the upcoming year so they can plan around their deadlines properly. Our schedule runs from Tuesday to Friday from 12PM to 11PM (GMT), and we try to keep the residents’ timezone in mind when scheduling their show. We’d always want for them to be able to tune in live at a decent hour, but it can definitely get tricky facilitating that with this amount of residents in so many different cities around the world.
What technology and systems were crucial for making global coordination possible? How has this evolved since you started?
I like working in a very organised and streamlined way, and feel like having a clear and functional structural foundation is the most important thing. Make it easy for yourself to find information, keep a good overview of important data, and have e-mail templates - it might sound simple and logical, but I really believe it’s adamant to have good operational structures and systems in place. Radio Cult is one of the technologies we use and has been key in smoothening out our workflow. At the beginning we were working with another software and basically did the best we could with what we had, and it created quite a few stressful moments. So I also think it’s crucial to not be afraid of changing systems or to re-assess things, and to stay open to evolving.
Has it been difficult to maintain a sense of cohesion and shared identity when your community is so geographically dispersed?
In prioritising our residents to either be based on the African continent or part of the African diaspora, we hope for them to feel the sense of cohesion through that shared identity. One of my favorite aspects of community operations is hearing and seeing Oroko Radio residents link up and collaborate with each other from a distance or in real life when visiting each other’s cities - being on the Oroko roster together really seems to have created this community of artists across so many different continents and that’s definitely one of the things I’m most proud of.
What have been the most unexpected challenges of scaling a global radio operation? Things you never anticipated when you started?
With every application round comes a wave of new residents and it’s important to make sure we can actually facilitate that - over time we’ve added two extra hours and at some point even an extra day to our schedule to accommodate the amount of residents on our roster. This, as well as having a growing community, obviously increases the workload over time and to grow along with that properly we added some members to our team to assist with day-to-day operations. But being a not-for-profit organization that relies on funding and grants, it’s hard to consistently have a sustainable base, let alone scale up.
How do you discover and onboard new hosts when they could literally be anywhere in the world?
We have yearly application rounds where people can apply to become a resident. We’ll share the announcement on our platforms and you can apply for a show via our website. We all travel quite a bit as well and it has happened that one of us saw a DJ play and thought “they’d make a great addition to the roster” and then we share that person’s profile with the rest of the team. Our eyes and ears are always open for talent and I love that as platforming new voices is one of my favorite things about this job.
Have you found that certain regions or cities have become natural hubs for your community? Why do you think that happened?
Definitely Accra in Ghana as it’s the place it all started, most of the initial Oroko residents were either based or from there and it’s where some of the first Oroko Radio events took place. Kenya and South Africa have naturally become hubs where we have a big number of residents - we always have a lot of applications from those regions. We also have a strong presence in the places we are from or were based in over the years, like Nigeria, the UK and Berlin.
How has Radio Cult helped solve some of the logistical nightmares of coordinating across time zones and continents?
Radio Cult offers a scheduling feature, which has dramatically improved our day-to-day radio operations. It has made it a lot easier to set up as a lot of data is already present in the software and I just need to edit or add to the schedule each week. Archiving shows with Radio Cult works very nicely as well, their easy-to-use feature to upload to platforms like Mixcloud and Soundcloud makes it less time consuming than before and has helped ease our workflow a lot.
What advice would you give to other stations looking to travel down a similar path?
Make sure you have an organized structure in place. Be ready for what’s coming when you decide to scale up. Never forget the values you and your organization stands for.
What are the future goals for Oroko?
It’s been an eventful and busy summer so far and we have some exciting club nights and projects coming up over the next few months, as well as the second edition of Kuro Sounds - an event on the coast of Ghana where music, art and the community come together to create, surf and dance together. Like many organizations like ours, we hope to get some more structural grants and funding so we can exist for a long time to come and remain a platform and community that supports and showcases talent from the African continent and diaspora.
