This project offers a critical case study of community radio’s health promoting potentials in Maternity World Wide’s (MWW) reproductive health project in Ethiopia. In partnership with the Danish development organization MWW, we have designed a participatory radio guideline as a supplement to the established project. Multiple determinants influence the reproductive health situation in the rural area of West Wollega where the Integrated Maternal Health Project is situated. MWW have requested an initiative that targets and challenges the underlying social structures that determine the women’s reproductive health. The theoretical basis consists of a variety of theorist; from Paulo Freires liberating theory from 1968 to Thomas Tufte’s current publication on participatory radio from 2013. We can conclude that radio provides a dialogical platform in which it is possible to break the ‘culture of silence’ and the implicit acceptance of status quo. However, donor dependency and lack of resources challenges the effort to make a participatory and local driven radio and complicates the process in practice. We find that radio activities such as radio plays, listening clubs and SMS-call-in’s, combined with the existing activities have the potential to empower the individual, the community and at a political level.