Four APC-Africa-Women Network members are attending the Highway Africa 2006 conference in Grahamstown. The conference started yesterday, September 11 2006, with a diverse group of journalists from the continent. This morning, we have participated in the plenary sessions that were quite interesting. During the sessions on the state of media in Africa this morning, a speaker raised issues African media face, which I found particularly important.
Four APC-Africa-Women Network members are attending the Highway Africa 2006 conference in Grahamstown. The conference started yesterday, September 11 2006, with a diverse group of journalists from the continent. This morning, we have participated in the plenary sessions that were quite interesting. During the sessions on the state of media in Africa this morning, a speaker raised issues African media face, which I found particularly important.
One of the speakers, talked about content generation in Africa and archiving. It is always a challenge for African media to create their own content and to store their archives. They rely on content sent by the BBC, CNN, and others; thus, disseminating content that doesn’t meet the needs of people in Africa, etc. Some participants said that the only predominant local content in African media is music.
This is true for most of African media. When I was at the university, I made a research on Congolese TV cultural productions, and I found out that more than 60% of content was donated to them as a “gift” by Canal France International.
Speakers explained that African media are not generating their own content because of a lack of human, financial and material resources. But, we should recognize that some efforts are being made by media to bring more local content to their audiences. This should be a major concern for African governments to invest more funds in content generation.