Mobile reporting boosts child protection

  1. Posted on Friday 24 June 2011 - 18:33
    AfricaNews editor
    Olivier Nyirubugara, Voices of Africa Media Foundation Senior Coach, Haarlem, The Netherlands
    Tanzanian mobile reporter Jacob Mugini can congratulate himself and feel happy after his report on child exploitation by teachers has caused that practice to end in his area, in the North. With his mobile phone, he captured images of primary school children carrying firewood meant for the teachers' households, and others working, in school uniforms on teachers' farms.
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    ‘Immediately after this report was published on VoicesofAfrica.com it shocked some senior education officials in Tanzania. They ran to the school, which is situation in a remote area…The school head teacher was transferred from that particular school’, Mugeni said last Tuesday, 21 June in Bonn Germany. He, together with two other former trainees of Voices of Africa Media Foundation (VOMF), attended the 4th edition of the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum.

    ‘The children were happy after realising that it was my story that had pushed the officials to transfer the head teacher’, Mugini added during a workshop hosted by the VOAMF. His colleagues too had similar stories, which they showed and explained at the same occasion.

    Shanti George, an expert in the rights of the Child at The Hague-based Bernard van Leer Foundation, was among the speakers during that same workshop. With concrete examples, she wondered why mainstream media largely fail to amplify children’s voices.