Assessment of Community Radio on Social and Economic Development: A Case Study of Spider Radio FM 1027 Kaduna Polytechnic Nigeria

The main hope of a community radio is to improve the living conditions of the community it serves by dispensing knowledge to the community through its programmes. The same process is taking place in the conventional radios stations. Despite this, we find that the community radio faces a lot of challenges of poor management due to lack of professionalism with exception of campus radio stations that are purposely meant to train students on road casting. Community radio plays a vital role in the communications of a country. Community radio mainly serves a definite community and is a form of public-service broadcasting. It reflects the culture, ideology and thoughts, norms and values of a particular community (Khan, Khan, Hassan Ahmed and Haque, 2017). It is the media of citizens of a particular community that has become popular and new opportunity for both the media practitioner and grassroots people. Fraser (2001) posited that community radio helps to avail utilities and amenities for various development aspects of our society like education, health, water and sanitation, protection from natural disasters, address social issues at the community level and connect rural population with the government. It is because of all these glaring functions of community radio that this study intends to assess the impact of Spider Radio FM, 102.7 in its role of developing the social and economic development of its listeners.