Not every episode of the Pure Digital Passion Podcast is recorded at a studio with cameras rolling. A few weeks ago Klaas Glenewinkel was in Nairobi for a few days and we found ourselves at a table in a restaurant in Westlands, and I did what I have done a handful of times over the years when a conversation is too good to lose. I hit record on my phone. What follows is audio only, with the clatter of a restaurant behind it, and I think it is one of the more useful conversations I have had this year about the business of African media, as opposed to the technology of it.

Klaas has run MiCT, Media in Cooperation and Transition, a Berlin-based media development non-profit, since 2004. Its work runs from Iraq, Syria and Libya to Sudan and South Sudan, and it operates an Exile Media Hub for East African journalists here in Nairobi. Since 2019 he has also been Director of the East Africa Radio Service (EARS) in Kampala, which is the reason we were talking. A CIMA study on the sustainability of local radio in Africa, quoted on MiCT’s own website, described EARS as helping proximity stations bargain collectively for a bigger share of the advertising market, and flagged it as one to watch. Seven years on, Klaas was in Nairobi to talk about what comes next: a lightweight audio app that brings together radio stations, podcasts and audiobooks for the East African market, and, he hopes, West Africa and the diaspora after that.

“Others” Is The Market Leader

The origin story is a frustration I share. Klaas and his colleagues looked at how international aid money was being spent on media in this part of the world and concluded that it was not building anything independent. “We thought this is not a good system. We want to support the independence of media, and so we wanted to work on the revenues of media outlets,” he told me. EARS is the result: a sales house for local radio stations, based in Uganda, with some business in Kenya, South Sudan and Tanzania.

The problem it solves is one every media buyer in Kenya and the rest of Africa will recognise. A rural station has no access to national advertisers, no sales people to go and find them, and is too small to matter on its own. EARS bundles these stations into audience packages and sells the package. “With one contract, you can reach everybody up country. This usually is work no agency or no advertiser wanted to do, to call up 150 radio stations and say, listen, we would like to run a campaign, because that’s 150 contracts.” The stations do no selling at all for national campaigns. EARS does it, keeps a commission, and remits the rest.

If you look at any IPSOS radio survey there is a row at the bottom labelled others. “If others would be a station, it would be the leader.” I went and checked this against the Kenyan numbers after we spoke, and he is right here too. In the IPSOS radio audience survey for the fourth quarter of 2025, Citizen Radio led with 17%, Radio 47 had 9%, Radio Jambo 7.2%, Kameme 5.7% and Radio Maisha 3.9%. The top 5 stations in Kenya together account for under 43% of the market. Everyone else, the long tail, is more than 57%. In Uganda, EARS cites NAMS data putting radio listenership at 86% of the population. This is the long tail story, and it is a significant one.

Almost USD 2 Million, For Stations That Live Off Nothing

The momentum is real, if measured. “In our last year, almost 2 million US dollars of advertising revenues we shared with these small radio stations,” Klaas said, and he was quick to put it in context. Many of these stations run on volunteers. “It’s a guy in the kitchen with a microphone.” One business model he admires is the walk-in: you can buy an hour of airtime, walk into the studio and say whatever you like, whether you are a trader, a politician or a rescue service. It is as direct as sales get.

What worries him is who else has noticed that these licences are cheap. Religious broadcasters in Uganda have been buying up small stations, and he is blunt about why it works. “They have the perfect business model because they live off donations and they pay nothing for content, because it’s all praying.” The stations EARS wants to protect are the ones that talk about the community, hold local government to account and give people a place to speak. His observation that the more talk a station has, the more successful it is, matched what I see in the Kenyan data, where the Communications Authority’s audience measurement for January to March 2026 put news and current affairs at 46.67% of listenership and entertainment and talk shows at 21.11%. Talk radio is not a niche in East Africa. It is the party where everyone shows up. 

Radio People Stay Radio People

Here is the paradox that EARS has to navigate. Most advertising spend in Uganda is still analogue, but the audience is changing fast, because moile data is getting cheaper, the networks are better and smartphone penetration has spiked. Klaas’s bet is that the audience will not change what it listens to, only how. “If you walk through the streets of a village in Uganda, everybody’s listening to radio with the smartphone, but it’s analogue,” he said, because the Android phone has an FM chip. “They’re really radio people in this Africa, and they will stick to radio because it’s their language, it’s their home, and it’s their family wherever they have moved to.”

I asked him why radio has been so durable here when every other legacy medium has been eroded. Price is part of it. Radio is free, in a market where even pay TV in Uganda means buying a decoder box. But he pointed out that radio numbers are not falling in Germany either, where it remains a companion medium that runs all day in the kitchen and the living room. It is pre-selected for you, a bit of talk and a bit of music, and you do not have to choose. That is as true of a Luo station in Kisumu as it is of a station in Berlin.

The Gateway Problem

The conversation then turned to something I have written about for over a decade. Meta and Google are arriving on the same cheap devices, preloaded, and Klaas sees that as a problem for local media. “There’s countries where people think Facebook or Instagram is the internet,” he said, and they never leave it. I reminded him of the net neutrality fight over Facebook Zero and later Free Basics, where zero-rated data was dressed up as a gift to the poor. India’s telecoms regulator banned differential pricing of data on 8 February 2016, and Facebook withdrew Free Basics from the country within days. The regulator’s own reasoning was that letting operators define the nature of access was equivalent to letting them define the user’s experience of the internet.

On the surface, free access looks like a good idea. In practice, it funnels every user into one experience, and the local content providers who are not inside the walled garden are simply not seen. For a platform whose entire purpose is to make the long tail of African radio visible, that is an existential concern, not a policy issue. 

My Gen Z Uber Driver & The Data Question

I told Klaas about an Uber or Bolt ride I took in Nairobi recently. The driver was clearly Gen Z, and halfway through the trip when we were in traffic he gestured to a newspaper vendor to bring him a copy. I asked him why, given everything we have been told about young people living on their smartphones in Kenya and globally. His answer was that the newspaper gives him a whole day of reading between rides without burning his data. That one exchange completely dismantled my preconceived notions about digital-first youth media consumption behaviour going back about ten years and redefines the real question for any streaming service in Kenya. How does someone in rural Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda deal with the data costs of listening online?

An App Built For 8 Kilobits

Klaas’s answer is that the app has been engineered for exactly this constraint. “We are working with a very strong codec. Using only eight kilobits, you can listen to a radio programme, so it doesn’t cost you much.” Listeners will be able to download programmes after midnight, when data is more affordable, and listen offline, which turns a live radio stream into something closer to a podcast feed. “It’s really lightweight compared to Spotify or to whatever. It’s really made for the market here.”

The app aggregates radio stations, podcasters and audiobooks, and the ambition is multi-country. It is in a closed Android test with 100 users, which Klaas described as “ready-ish”. The initial focus is Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, but West Africa is next, because MiCT already works with radio stations in Benin, Togo, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria and Mali, and because, in Klaas’s words, there is no app in West Africa. The diaspora is the other obvious audience. Some stations stream from their own websites, but you have to find them, and many cannot afford the infrastructure at all. EARS will host the streams for them.

Advertising, Not Subscriptions

I asked how all of this makes money, and the answer was refreshingly straightforward. “From what I have researched, people here do not tend to pay for subscriptions,” Klaas said, and I agreed with him. Forget the subscription model. The app will be funded by advertising, and specifically by a service that barely exists in East Africa today: digital audio advertising, sold as a pre-stream commercial targeted to the listener’s language, age group and location. It will be sold directly, not programmatically, because EARS already has the advertiser relationships from its Ugandan operation and already has a sales team in place. The digital inventory is a new service offering for the same client base. 

The 100 Listener Question

 “Our biggest worry is what happens if more than 100 people are listening to this stream, because we haven’t tested this.” The server is an Amazon instance in South Africa that has not been stress tested. There is no development team in the conventional sense: a backend developer in Nairobi, two people in Berlin, and a great deal of bootstrapping. “It’s really a grassroots startup.”

If the on-air promotion model works then the app will go from 100 listeners to 100,000 faster than a bootstrapped backend can be rebuilt. IPSOS Kenya’s audience tracker had Radio Jambo alone reaching 7.3 per cent of more than 3.1 million Nairobi radio listeners in November 2025. One station, one city. The infrastructure question is the project.

The Flywheel

The go-to-market plan is the smartest thing in the whole model, and it costs nothing. Stations that join the app get a share of the digital advertising revenue, which they do not get from the likes of Spotify, or their own streaming, where they often pay to be carried. In return, EARS asks them to promote the app on air. “The radio stations who are part of the app will play spot promotion ten times a day to promote our app. From a marketing business perspective, that is free advertising.” The incentive is aligned: the more downloads, the more streams, the more advertising revenue the station earns. It is a flywheel built on the one asset a small station has in abundance, which is airtime.

What Is In It For Podcasters, Including Me

At this stage EARS is collecting content: publishers, radio stations and podcasters who understand that being on the platform might create some extra revenue. It will be very little at first, Klaas admits, but a little is more than nothing. Podcasts can be pulled in by RSS, so I asked the obvious question, whether I could syndicate Pure Digital Passion to the platform, and the answer was yes, as long as I have no exclusivity agreements, which I do not. “Wherever you get your podcasts from, we want to be one of those.”

That led to a candid exchange about how podcasting actually pays in Kenya. The biggest problem for any podcast is discovery. Most of my audience is in my local markets, and Spotify does not yet let a Kenyan podcaster commercialize locally through the platform. The only way I make money from the podcast is a direct brand deal, and I never sell it as just a podcast. A brand launching a product or profiling a member of its team gets a blog post, the podcast in video and audio, social media posts and short-form video, as one bundle. 

The reason it works is that my niche, technology, business, media and marketing, is not that competitive, unlike lifestyle. Klaas was fascinated by this, and by the size of Kenya’s podcast scene relative to Uganda and Tanzania, which he thinks are not yet at the same level. He had listened to a popular Kenyan comedy podcast on his way to our meeting and enjoyed it. The young listener may not stream live radio, but they will download a weekly show on Wi-Fi and listen to it in the matatu. That on-demand habit is the opportunity.

Name The App

Then Klaas did something I have never had a guest do. He asked the audience, and me, to help name the product. He read out 6 candidates that have already been through availability checks: Semadio, Yandeo, Oyono, Oyodo, Jamacast and Ongea. 

My reaction in the moment was that Ongea works immediately because anyone in East Africa knows it means speak, with the only catch being that other digital brands may have tried it before. Oyodo has something playful about it that reminded me of Yahoo, the brand I grew up with, though it is also a Luo name and might read as a Luo station to a Kenyan ear. The one I fought with was Jamacast. Adding “cast” describes what the product does, which is too much in the face. A good name should be clever and simple, and the listener who hears a promo on air should be able to type it into the Play Store without missing it.

Then I made a suggestion, and if Klaas takes it, he has agreed on tape that he owes me one. Ongea, spelt O N G A I R. Phonetically it is still speak, but the spelling says over the air, which is what radio is, and it gives a designer something to play with in the logo mark. I also pointed out that a Kenyan technology company already used that name. 

Ongair was founded in Nairobi in 2014 by Trevor Kimenye and Charles Gichuki, its name was derived from the same Kiswahili word, it built a dashboard for businesses to serve customers over WhatsApp and other messaging apps, and it raised venture funding from Nest in Hong Kong. I know the founders. Whether the trademark is still live is the first thing Klaas needs to check.

His original choice had been Jambo Cast, and francophone contacts in West Africa liked it because jambo has become an international greeting. My advice was to lose the cast and think about Ongea, test the “air” spelling with French speakers, and remember that Kiswahili is also spoken in the DRC, so a Swahili name can go further into francophone Africa than it first appears. He was sending the shortlist to friends in Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso and Mali that same evening.

How EARS Actually Sells

I closed by asking how the commercial side works in practice. EARS works directly with brands, with governments and with international aid organisations, and it positions itself as a help to advertising agencies rather than a competitor, because agencies rarely have a focus on radio up country. “We make their life much easier, by doing all the nasty negotiations with 70 radio stations up country.” Reporting is done with IPSOS, so the agency gets a professional post-campaign report. There is no real marketing presence to speak of. There are 20 people on the ground in Uganda going one by one, making an offer, winning or losing, and moving to the next one.

That is what I found most persuasive about the whole venture. The digital product is new, bootstrapped and untested at scale. The sales rationale behind it is 7 years old, has shared almost USD 2 million with the smallest stations in the region and already has clients. Most products and brands fail because of obscurity, because nobody knows they are there. EARS has spent 7 years solving obscurity for the long tail of African radio in the analogue world. The app is the same job, in the digital one.

If you run a radio station, publish podcasts or audiobooks, or buy audio advertising in East Africa, you can find EARS at ears.ug and MiCT at mict-international.org. And Klaas, if the name sticks, you know where to find me 🙂 

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