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Differing Communication Patterns of Rural and Urban Residents

There is a stark rural-urban split in access to most media and ICTs (shown in Table 1a below). This also helps to explain why a relatively high percentage of rural residents said they rely on word-of-mouth sources as a regular (weekly) news source. Note in Table 1b that there are three sources that are used regularly by a higher percentage of rural than by urban dwellers, and that all three are human sources: “friends and family,” “other people in the community” and “government officials.”

Tables 1a and 1b: Urban and Rural Communication Access and Use

AudienceScapes National Survey of Kenya, July 2009. N=2000: 695 Urban and 1305 Rural.
*=differences statistically significant at the 5 percent level, **= differences statistically significant at the 1 percent level.

Lower access and use could be linked to several possible factors, including poor infrastructure for accessing media and ICTs, lower socioeconomic status (notably in terms of lower income and educational attainment) or lack of interest either in using a particular source or in obtaining news and information.

The AudienceScapes data suggest that all these factors except lack of interest come into play in rural areas: the proportion of nonusers who list “I am not interested” as one reason they do not use the medium was higher for urban than for rural residents for radio, TV and newspapers. Similarly, the proportion of nonusers who listed “I do not need [the item]” as one reason they do not use ICTs was higher for urban than for rural residents for both the internet and for mobile phones. Since rural residents did not express lower levels of interest in obtaining news from these sources, we can seek answers about rural information habits by looking at infrastructure, income and education.

Rural infrastructure shortfalls include electricity and signal reception. As shown in Chart 1, rural households are less likely than urban ones to have electricity of any kind and are far less likely to be connected to the main power grid.

Chart 1
            

Another indicator of the impact of poor supporting infrastructure on the availability of news and information is the number and variety of media outlets: do as many broadcast signals and newspaper deliveries reach rural residents as reach city dwellers? The survey results suggest they do not (Chart 2). Rural respondents, on average, have fewer TV channels available to them at home.

Chart 2
             

Newspaper use also suffers from limited reach, though of print delivery infrastructure rather than of transmission signals. Twenty percent of those in rural areas who did not read a newspaper at all in the last year (N=565) said one reason was that newspapers are not available in their area; only 10 percent of their urban counterparts (N=143) cited this reason. Regarding radio, there were no significant rural-urban differences in the proportion of people reporting they did not listen because no signals are available to them; that said, the number of respondents who said they do not listen to the radio was already quite small.

Rural residents’ lower average incomes, measured by the survey’s subjective self-measurement of economic status (Chart 3), is an obvious impediment to accessing relatively costly information sources such as TVs, the internet, and personal mobile phones. When asked to characterize what their household is able to afford, 41 percent of rural inhabitants (versus 18 percent of urban households) indicated that they have trouble even affording basic necessities such as food or clothing, or both.

Chart 3 
                  

Corroborating this subjective assessment, the survey’s more-objective measures of households’ socioeconomic status also demonstrate the large differences in urban and rural lifestyles (Tables 2a and 2b).

Tables 2a and 2b Indicators of Household Socioeconomic Status

AudienceScapes National Survey of Kenya, July 2009. N=2000 adults (15+): 695 urban, 1305 rural. Differences between urban and rural are statistically significant at the 1% level

 Granted, a somewhat larger percentage of rural than urban residents said they are working full or part time as opposed to not working (Charts 4 and 5). However, rural dwellers’ predominant occupation is farming, which tends to be a low-wage or subsistence activity for many Kenyans.

Chart 4
                                  
Chart 5
                                 

Urban-Rural Divide and the Role of Education:

Lower levels of education in rural areas also limit the scope for information gathering, particularly given that new ICTs such as the internet and SMS services usually require literate audiences. Fourteen percent of rural respondents said they have had no formal education, compared to 4 percent of urban respondents. At the other end of the spectrum, only 10 percent of rural respondents said they have more than a secondary education, versus 27 percent in urban areas. (The differences in education between urban and rural residents are statistically significant at the 1 percent level.)

Controlling for education levels (that is, comparing only respondents with similar levels of education to each other), some of the differences in urban and rural residents’ frequency of media use narrow or become statistically insignificant. Many differences remain, however: at many levels of education, rural residents still watch TV less frequently, read newspapers and magazines less frequently, use the internet and SMS services less frequently and use word-of-mouth sources of news and information somewhat more frequently than urban residents do. This supports the conclusion that lower average levels of education in rural areas help explain some of the urban-rural communication gap, but that there are other factors at work as well.

Literacy aside, understanding Kenya’s official languages of English and Kiswahili is also key to using newspapers, government documents, the internet, and SMS services, all which are primarily in those two languages. Speaking and understanding Kiswahili is nearly universal nationwide, with 95 percent of rural respondents and 99 percent of urban respondents saying they do so. However, only 59 percent of rural respondents said they can speak and understand English, compared to 80 percent of those in urban areas.