The Rwanda Media High Council (MHC) is carrying out a national survey on media audience and readership, the first of its kind in the country.

"Incisive Africa”, a Kigali based research and consulting company that won the tender to take on the survey, on Monday held a consultative meeting with various media practitioners in Kigali to touch base on the feasibility of the survey.

Expected results from the survey will reflect the basic statistics on the state and practice of media industry in the country, in a move to improve on their activities and their impact on the community.

The Executive Secretary of the MHC, Patrice Mulama, said the survey has great potential to develop the media industry in Rwanda.

"It is not possible to develop the media industry without having basic information about it,” he said, adding that the results from the survey will also help to attract more investors in the field.

Mulama disclosed that the survey will help establish which type of media reaches deeper into the corners of the country, how their programmes are appreciated by the audiences from their own perspectives, and what challenges the media is facing today.

He was also quick to praise the Incisive Africa methodology of consulting different stakeholders before heading to the field for research, which according to him will make the questionnaires stronger enough to touch on different points of view from the audience.

The Director of Incisive Africa, Kenn Ndirangu, explained that the overall sample of the survey will consist of two thousand respondents aged 16 and above, gathered from two hundred total sampling points that will be selected throughout both urban and rural areas of the country.

Ndirangu however said that for the sake of data quality and to avoid biases, journalists will not be used either as respondents or as part of the interviewers, as the company has its own employees.

"They [employees] always need to be trained for the forthcoming field interview,” he said, mentioning the use of household interviews and random selection of respondents using household register and Kish Grid methods as the methodology they opted for. 

The timeline for this survey shows that the fieldwork execution will be completed by early April, and the final report is expected in mid June this year.

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