Challenging mobile projects emerge from grants scheme

Aug 22, 2012 at 02:18 am by Staff


Innovative and interesting projects are likely to emerge from five recipient in this year’s WAN-Ifra Mobile News for Africa grant and training scheme.

MNFA director Catharine Fulton says projects being developed this year are diverse: “They range from development of an SMS news alert app in Nigeria, to the revamping of a mobile journalism project in Cote D’Ivoire, to a mobile news alert and Mogadishu city guide in Somalia,” she says.

One of last year’s projects, ‘Star Reports’ is already turning heads. Dickens Olewe, a journalist and web administrator at ‘The Star’ in Kenya says it’s hard to have a conversation about the country at the moment without without talking about the mobile revolution.

The paper’s media development success story challenges ideas that all African media is rudimentary. “Kenya is now renowned around the world for its innovative mobile money system which has changed how people send, receive and save money; a concept that’s currently being replicated the world over,” he says. “Concurrently, the mobile phone is leading another revolution – how people consume, share and interact with news.”

The ‘Star Reports’ Android application allows citizen journalists to upload news reports to a dedicated website where readers can view the entire stream of content, or filter stories according to various categories and regions. Those stories are also fed into The Star’s workflow, where the newspaper and affiliated radio and television stations can pick up submitted content for development into stories featured in print or broadcast – a key benefit to help provide coverage of underserved areas of the country.

‘Star Reports’ was one of ten successful mobile applications developed by nine newspapers that participated in last year’s WAN-Ifra Mobile News project. Five more newspapers in as many countries have been selected this year to work toward the development of mobile services that will benefit their organisations and readership.

Recipients of the MNFA grant are Hamar News Network (Somalia), The Windhoek Observer (Namibia), Naija247News (Nigeria), Abidjan Live News (Cote D’Ivoire) and Omnimedia (Ghana). Find out more about the project here, or download the MNFA’s free handbook ‘Mobile Media Services at Sub-Saharan African Newspapers: A Guide to Implementing Mobile News and Mobile Business’ here.

MNFA is part of a strategic partnership between WAN-Ifra and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency to advance media development and press freedom worldwide.  More on the partnership and its projects here.

Sections: Digital technology

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