The Value of Radio to an Oral Society in West Africa

Pastor Prao Kouakou is from Cote d’Ivoire, Africa and has served as the WMB Coordinator for the West Africa Field since 1997. Pastor Kouakou coordinates the radio programming activities in Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin and Ghana. The following is an update taken from the French interview conducted during General Assembly in Orlando, Florida, July 2009.

“Radio ministry is very important in the West Africa Field because we in Africa generally come from people groups with oral traditions. For this reason, whatever comes from the radio has value. Whatever comes from the radio has a great importance. And this is why we have for a long time considered it necessary to use radio to proclaim the message of holiness. We have seen testimonies come from the radio broadcasts we produce.

I am very happy to be doing radio ministry. I am a pastor, of course, and for me, radio is another means of evangelization, a means of edification. That is to say, at church I speak to a very limited number of people, but with radio I speak to hundreds of people. Depending on the power of the transmitters, I can speak to a million people. Sometimes, because we work with Trans World Radio International, our programming is broadcast as far as South Africa, and these broadcasts cover all of West Africa, thus there are millions of listeners who are all receiving our radio broadcasts at once. That’s why, to me, this ministry is very important.

We receive a lot of reactions from our listeners convincing us that our broadcasts are having a great impact on the population of West Africa, because our listeners react, they write to us, they tell us what they are feeling about our radio programs, and because of that we have many testimonies. One of those testimonies that I would like to share here today is that of a listener who today is the wife of the District Superintendent of Benin. And this young woman who regularly listened to our radio programs in Benin, not knowing that the Church of the Nazarene was in Benin, she took a month to listen to our programs to understand the teaching, the message of holiness, through our programs. This woman, at first, wanted to join the Church of the Nazarene, even before she knew the church was in Benin. It was later that she understood that the church was in Benin, and she joined a Nazarene church, and in the end, today she has become the wife of the District Superintendent of Benin.

I ask our listeners, I ask our partners, I ask everyone in the Church of the Nazarene, the international Nazarene world everywhere, to pray for us. We need to be supported in prayer. Pray that the West Africa radio ministry can really continue to touch lives, can continue to touch homes, can continue to touch people in distress. Thank you. May God bless you.