Fanya kazi at tovuti training on Nyerere Day

This is my first posting from a training course on investigative internet journalism arranged at the Tanzania Global Learning Agency (TaGLA) at the Institute of Finance Management in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of Tanzania.

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

This training is the third investigative internet journalism training so far and already the 25th 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, radio producers, and local reporters and journalism lecturers in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Zanzibar and Arusha.


This picture is from Iringa - just to show how to
add a picture. Simple and easy, but usually you
are not allowed to copy any pictures without
the copyright. Photo by Matt Crypto.

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

Now, at this investigative internet journalism training, there are nine participants from four national newspapers, three radio stations and two institutions for journalism education. Most of the participants have attended similar training courses before, and some have also been conducting internet training either at their college or at one of the regional training events organized within this same programme.

This time we are working with brand new laptop computers and using wireless internet access to find information from the internet, or tovuti in Swahili. The training class is a small meeting room, rather a cabinet, with deep leather chairs, no windows, and huge purple curtains hanging over the walls.

Outside, Dar es Salaam is warm, peaceful and calm. Only few people are today around in this part of town, as it is Nyerere Day, a public holiday to commemorate Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere. Education and hard work were some of the ideals taught by Mwalimu Nyerere, originally a teacher by profession. I also admire the determination of the participants for attending a training on a public holiday – while others are resting and entertaining themselves.

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