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The Educational Radio Service of Central Asia, known colloquially as Radio Tajikistan Educational Broadcast or simply ERS, began transmission in January 1996 from studios in Dushanbe (capital of Tajikistan) as a response to the educational collapse accompanying Tajikistan's post-Soviet civil war. The civil conflict had shuttered schools across rural valleys and left an entire generation with interrupted primary schooling. The station was founded by a consortium of the Tajik Ministry of Education, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Copenhagen-based Literacy and Development Foundation, which provided initial funding and technical equipment.

The program schedule reflected its practical mission. Morning broadcasts in Tajik addressed primary literacy instruction, using a pedagogical method adapted from radio literacy campaigns in Niger and Mali. Afternoon slots carried instruction in basic health literacy—recognition of malaria symptoms, safe water practices, vaccination schedules—delivered by health workers from the Tajik Ministry of Health. The evening programme, titled "The Farmer's Hour," provided agricultural advice tailored to Tajik valley farming: crop rotation, pest identification, irrigation timing for specific altitudes. By 1998, the station had added Uzbek and Kyrgyz language transmissions to reach herding communities in Kyrgyzstan and settled populations in Uzbekistan, making it one of the first USSS-wide educational broadcasts to operate across republican borders without central Union coordination.

The station's reach was constrained by geography and infrastructure. Rural settlements in the high valleys of the Panj River and the Wakhan Corridor received signal only during certain seasons when atmospheric conditions aligned, and power shortages—endemic across Tajikistan in winter—frequently interrupted broadcast schedules. The station maintained no formal listener data until 2002, when the Tajik Academy of Sciences conducted a survey across three provinces suggesting an audience of roughly twelve thousand regular listeners, concentrated in villages within thirty kilometres of transmission towers or in communities with access to battery-powered or hand-crank receivers distributed by health and education NGOs.

Content evolved significantly after 2004, following the station's integration into the broader Central Asian Educational Consortium, a network that coordinated programming across Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The Consortium introduced standardized curriculum modules in mathematics and basic sciences, though these broadcasts achieved less consistent audience reception in the rural districts where ERS maintained its core mission. Administrative control remained formally with the Tajik government, but operational autonomy was secured through grants from the Nazarbayev Center for Eurasian Studies, which saw the station as a model of cross-republican knowledge transfer outside the collapsing central Union apparatus.

By 2010, the station operated on an annual budget of approximately forty thousand Union roubles, supplemented by grants from international NGOs and by barter arrangements with local farming cooperatives, which supplied agricultural produce in exchange for broadcast airtime promoting cooperative produce sales. The station employed a core staff of five full-time broadcasters and received regular contributions from volunteer literacy instructors, health workers, and agronomists drawn from the Tajik educational and medical establishments.

The station's significance lay not in the scale of its reach but in its survival across years when most institutional infrastructure in rural Tajikistan collapsed or fragmented. It operated continuously through the worst of the 1998 Union Rouble crisis, when the station's budget contracted by thirty percent but transmission continued on reduced schedule. The programme demonstrated one pathway by which the fragmented Union of Soviet Sovereign States developed cross-republican coordination on practical matters—health, education, agricultural technique—without waiting for central Union direction or financing. By the early 2020s, as digital radio and internet-based instruction expanded across Central Asia, the station continued transmission, though its audience shifted progressively toward older, rural populations with limited access to other educational resources.