Mobile Reporting

The concept of mobile reporting, combined with community reporting is changing the way we perceive previously ignored local issues. While they hardly make it into traditional mainstream media, they are now flooding into cyberspace and the blogosphere thanks to the Web and mobile phone technologies. The power of the mobile phone in the context of community reporting resides in its simplicity, both through the ordinary tools used by reporters – the phones which almost everyone knows or owns by now – and through the reporters themselves, who are members of the community being reported about. Human rights are part of communities’ everyday life and are thus one of the most recurrent topics of community mobile reporting. In this workshop, Voices of Africa Media Foundation wants to focus on one specific topic, namely child rights and child abuse, as viewed and captured by mobile reporters in Tanzania, Kenya and Ghana. These reports show that mobile phones can serve as tools for child rights monitoring –and thus as human rights monitoring – when placed in the hands of trained community members.

Moderation:
Oliver Nyirubugara
Media Scholar and Journalist

Panelists:
Mugini Jacob Mwera
Journalist, Kenya

Njeri Akelo Meresa
Journalist, Kenya

Francisca Nuvor
Journalist, Ghana

van der Grift-Wanyoto, Vera
Information Management and Communication,
Bernard van Leer Foundation