February 13 is World Radio Day. It’s a young holiday, just two years old, established on the initiative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011. Representatives of all of the world’s major radio broadcasters, the Voice of Russia among them, have gathered at the UNESCO’s central headquarters in Paris to celebrate World Radio Day.

February 13 is not a random date. On that day in 1946, Radio UN aired its first broadcast. In his World Radio Day-2013 message, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that as a boy growing up in a poor village after the Korean War with neither phones nor television people still had something that connected them to the world outside their small village – they had radio. Since its invention more than 100 years ago, radio has sparked imagination and opened doors for change, entertaining, informing, promoting democracy and connecting people wherever they are, and “in conflict situations and times of crisis, radio is a lifeline for vulnerable communities,” Ban Ki-moon remarked.

About 95% of all people throughout the globe listen to radio regularly, chief of the UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector Mirta Lourenco told the Voice of Russia:

“Radio remains the most easily accessible mass media. You can listen to it in the remotest corners of the Earth. Thanks to radio, people who cannot read or write have access to information. Radio plays a crucial role in emergencies, natural disaster warning and during rescue operations. For the UNESCO, World Radio Day is the acknowledgment of the tremendous use of which radio has been to humanity over more than a century.”[…]

Read the full article at the Voice of Russia website.