Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Internet training at the shores of Lake Victoria

This is my first posting from an internet training workshop in Mwanza, Tanzania. There are altogether 20 Tanzanian journalists taking part in the training, 13 people from Mwanza town and the others from Sengerema, Karagwe, Bukoba, Shinyanga and Musoma. So practically the whole Lake Zone area is represented.

Seven of the participants are newspaper editors or correspondents, some freelance. Another seven are from radio stations, including three community radios. There are also two TV journalists (from Star TV and Channel Ten) and three journalism lecturers from St. Augustine University of Tanzania here in Mwanza.

The training is organized by MISA Tanzania and VIKES Foundation, The Finnish Foundation for Media, Communication and Development, a body for international cooperation of the Union of Journalists in Finland and other media organizations. Myself, I’m a radio journalist from the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE Radio 1.

As writing this, we have already spent the first day of the training in a meeting room turned into a multimedia classroom at the Bank of Tanzania Training Institute right at the shores of Lake Victoria, which is glimmering in the sun just below us.

The training has begun smoothly – even though we were lacking the internet connection for some hours during the day. In the morning, we first had an introduction round. Later, I showed some statistics of internet use in African countries and the rest of the world, and spoke a bit about the history of internet and about different uses of the internet from a technical point of view. And at the end of the day, when the network was back again, we did some more practical assignments: booking train tickets in Finland and flight tickets from Dar es Salaam to Bujumbura.

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