The Missing Pillar: Financial Resource Capacity as the Weakest Dimension of Institutional Capacity in Zambia’s Rural and Peri-Urban Community Radio Stations

Community radio is widely positioned as a vehicle for grassroots participation and rural development across sub-Saharan Africa, yet the institutional sustainability of individual stations remains persistently fragile. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study assessing the institutional capacity of rural and peri-urban community radio stations in Zambia, grounded in Institutional Capacity Building Theory and Resource Dependency Theory, and using the now-dormant Zambia Community Media Forum (ZaCoMeF) as a bounded case study. Survey data from station managers (N=19), corroborated by interviews with former ZaCoMeF officials and development partners, assessed institutional capacity across five dimensions: governance, human resources, financial resources, technical capacity, and programming. While overall capacity was moderate (M=3.61/5), financial resources emerged as the only dimension to fall below the scale midpoint (M=2.95), diverging sharply from comparatively strong governance and programming scores. This paper interrogates why financial capacity specifically underperforms, arguing through a resource dependency lens that stations’ structural reliance on unmediated, unpredictable external funding — absent an active umbrella body performing a boundary-spanning coordination function — undermines financial sustainability more fundamentally than any internal management deficiency. The paper also identifies a methodological finding of independent interest: the divergence between stations’ comparatively favourable self-rated governance capacity and less favourable external assessments, illustrating the value of mixed-methods triangulation in institutional capacity research. The paper concludes with station-level, sector-coordination, and policy recommendations for strengthening financial capacity in Zambia’s community radio sector.