East and Southern Africa Leads the Way in Media by Children

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Submitted by Yemisi Akinbobola on Mon, 07/03/2011 - 10:02am

East and Southern African countries seem to be setting the pace in encouraging children to join the media-sphere.

First it was a group of secondary school students in Nyamashekem, Rwanda that set up a Media Club in their school, now South African and Zambia are joining the trend.

In association with Media Monitoring Africa, Save the Children, and the EU, the Children & Media: Championship Best Practice is getting 600 children involved in three areas of journalism: writing ethical guidelines for journalists, the news agency and the training of child media monitors.

“We, as children in South Africa, make up 39% of the population, which is quite a lot,” said a grade 7 pupil of Parkhurst Primary School, Zinhle Tshabalala. "This project is quite exciting because we get the chance to know how media work."

"We find that children are not mentioned a lot in the media, which is not good at all,” said another pupil, Sibonginkosi Dera. "We even had a live video link with Zambia and shared ideas with the people there. A child journalist from Zambia called Brian Phiri told us about his experiences and asked me in SA what I had learnt from being a child media monitor."

The project to distribute news about children and written by children, was launched in Johannesburg on February 24^th.

"One of the best things about this project, as those of you who work with us will see, is that it is inherently positive. At its core, it's about building the quality of our media, deepening our democracy and realising the rights of our constitution," said the Media Monitoring Africa director, William Bird.