Tovuti training in the cool green highlands

This is my first posting from a training course on investigative internet journalism arranged at the Open University of Tanzania in Mbeya, the biggest town in the Tanzanian Southern Highlands. Mbeya is located not far from the border with Zambia and at an exhausting altitude of 1,700 metres from sea level. This means that the weather is cool, the clouds are hanging low, the nature and surrounding hills are lush green and nearby fields flourish with maize plants and sunflowers.

The training course is part of an internet training programme for Tanzanian journalists co-arranged by MISA-Tanzania and Vikes – The Finnish Foundation for Media and Development, a solidarity organization of the Union of Journalists in Finland, with support from the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

The training is the fifth investigative internet journalism training in Tanzania so far and already the 34th internet training course altogether arranged within the training programme which has been running since 2008.

Other previous internet courses have focused on editors from national mainstream media as well as radio producers, local reporters and journalism lecturers in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Zanzibar and Arusha.

During the last three years, separate Swahili-language training courses have also been arranged for local reporters and regional correspondents in twelve locations around the country, namely Dodoma, Iringa, Mbeya, Morogoro, Moshi, Mtwara, Musoma, Mwanza, Pemba, Shinyanga, Songea and Sumbawanga. These trainings have been conducted by a group of dedicated Tanzanian trainers who have been specifically trained for that as part of this same programme.

Now, at this investigative internet journalism training in Mbeya, there are 13 participants from four local radio stations, two national newspapers and four journalism schools located in Mbeya, Iringa and Kyela.

We are all neatly packed into an ICT student lab working hard with some brand new desktop computers and very fast internet access. Our task for the coming days is to search for information from the web, or tovuti in Swahili, and to produce journalistic stories based on our investigations.

More about the proceedings of the first training day will be published later