Attending the Indigenous Plant Use Forum in Keimoes
David’s first email address was radio_boy@hotmail.com – it fits, in any case david_smith had already been taken by several hundred other people.
The love for radio was always there – David’s grandfather give him his first shortwave radio when he was six years old and he clandestinely listened to broadcasts from around the world from underneath his blankets well beyond his bedtime – this included listening to programming that his mother thought was subversive!
David has worked extensively with the UN on media projects in conflict and post conflict zones from the Balkans to the Central African Republic, including the conception and implementation of the hugely successful Radio Okapi network in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Through Okapi Consulting, David Smith conceived and implemented a United Nations sponsored radio project, Bar-Kulan (meeting place in Somali), established for the people of Somalia and the Somali Diaspora.
His background in electronic media is extensive, including producer positions with the international public broadcasters of Canada and the Netherlands as well as managing a commercial transformation project at South Africa’s Capital Radio.
David’s work in development began in Zimbabwe shortly after independence as part of an education programme funded by the Canadian government to help get young Zimbabweans back into classrooms after the war in that country had ended. The career in radio was sparked by a fan letter he wrote to a radio station commending the newsroom on its coverage of events in Zimbabwe at the time.
While on mission, he hunts down books by local authors and writes about both the book and the search for it in Book Safari, a column in the Mail & Guardian newspaper (Johannesburg). Missions in francophone Africa are preferred because the food is better.
Read David Smith’s blog on the Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader page here
David Smith presents gold record to Bantu Holomisa for supporting Capital Radio with an Afritude
