"A good news man in Africa," says Simon Kelner

Daraja's Kwanza Jamii newspaper was the focus of Simon Kelner's column in The Independent newspaper (in the UK) today. This follows his visit to Njombe in February, in his role as Chief Executive of The Journalism Foundation.

Cut through a wattle forest, the dirt track to Lupembe does not afford the visitor from Europe an easy ride. From the nearest main road, it's a three-hour, bone-jarring journey – "an African massage," my companion said – to the heart of Tanzania's tea-growing country, through countryside that is more reminiscent of northern Europe than of Africa. It was the tail-end of the rainy season, and the verdant, rolling hills spoke of Derbyshire or the Dordogne.

The truth has no price - visiting @Verdade in Maputo

Daraja's Simon Mkina, Managing Editor of our Kwanza Jamii local newspapers visited Mozambique recently. He was there to learn from the experiences of the @Verdade newspaper, a weekly newspaper that like Kwanza Jamii, puts the community first. Unlike Kwanza Jamii, however, @Verdade is distributed free of charge. In this post, Simon Mkina tells us what he found.


By Simon Mkina

THERE is no way, one could walk around Maputo City without seeing  busy shopelas (three wheeler tuk-tuk,  in Shangana vernacular)  stopping by the road sides embarking or disembarking passengers.

Shopela, yellow tuk-tuk do that in all busy streets in Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique, from Monday to Thursday, but not on Fridays or Saturdays. Those two days are reserved for something else.

So what are they doing in the mornings on those two days? Simple, they are busy distributing heaps of newspapers to various areas in Maputo and in the locations.

"We can't change things" - research on citizens' attitudes to local governance

"We can't change things". This was what focus group participants told us when we conducted a study into citizens' attitudes towards local governance in Njombe, Ludewa and Makete. They were talking particularly about corruption, and expressing the idea that though they don't like corruption, they don't feel there's anything they can do about it. The corrupt go unpunished, the poor feel even more powerless, creating more space for corruption to continue - a vicious circle.

I presented a draft report of this study to the REPOA Annual Research Workshop in Dar es Salaam this week, on behalf of Frank Kaduma and Kapongola Nganyanyuka, the study's main authors. The presentation is enclosed below, and the full draft report can be found here.

A window back in time, Twende Pamoja local newspaper, 1956-1957

Good sources of information on local history in Tanzania are as rare as they are interesting. Which is why I was delighted that after much searching, we have finally found copies of Njombe's Twende Pamoja local newspaper dating from 1956 and 1957.

The paper was published by the Njombe District African Council prior to independence and the Njombe District Council after independence. According to Martin Sturmer's fascinating Media History of Tanzania (pdf), it was published between 1953 and 1964, though the issue numbers of the papers we have found suggest that it started a little later, in 1955. Each issue consists of 8 A4 pages and the paper was published monthly in Swahili.

It's a fascinating glimpse on a past world. I can highly recommend having a look, particularly if you have any interest in Tanzanian history, the lives and concerns of "ordinary" people, outside the world of high politics.There are arguments about high bride prices and discussions on witchcraft as well as how to improve agricultural productivity. There's a surprising amount of news about new initiatives to establish community groups - from the "Domestic and Hotel Workers Union" to the "Mdandu African Traders Association". And there's a huge amount of what would now be called "citizen journalism" - letters to the editor, articles and opinion pieces written by readers.

Change in Samaria Village

Samaria village centre

By Eric Kalunga, Daraja's Monitoring and Research Officer, and a participant on the recent Twaweza immersion exercise in Njombe

Samaria is a village in the new region Njombe and like many such villages in this area and most likely elsewhere in Tanzania it has its problems. Such problems include capitation grant not reaching the school, no electricity, poor roads and some unique ones like thugs who control the potato and wheat trade.

Samaria seems ripe for an NGO intervention. Get in there and start people talking, empower women to ask questions, get local artistes to sing about accountability and pin advocacy posters on every single door… and every single tree and the back of the local daladala too.

Maji Week, World Water Day, what more can we say?

Photo from Tanzania Journalists' Alliance

Over the past two years, this blog has repeatedly looked at Tanzania's water sector. We've looked at survey data on the state of water supply services, at citizens' attitudes to water and sanitation issues, at how the media and politicians engage in the sector, and at how the sector as a whole operates.

Today is World Water Day, the culmination of Maji Week, with the national "celebrations" taking place this year in Iringa. But rather than look for another aspect of the sector to analyse, let's look back at what this blog has said about Tanzania's water sector over the past two years, with 10 interesting facts about rural water supply: