The best thing was learning by doing

The training ended well today after a hectic training week. Speeches were held, contacts exchanged and group photos were taken.

The participants also wrote their final feedbacks from the training. Seif Jigge from the Maasai community radio ORS FM says that the best thing of the training was that it was done mostly by practical assignments. All other participants seemed to agree with that. “I’m so happy about the way we learned by doing,” writes Elias Msuya from Mwananchi.

Hilda Mhagama of the Daily News says that the Tanzanian audience doesn’t need journalists just for entertainment, but for educating the public.

Athumani Shariff, journalism lecturer at Dar es Salaam School of Journalism, was most inspired by learning to use the internet as a source for data. The truth is that in the Tanzanian media the internet is still not much used for fact-finding.

“Gathering details and supporting stories from a number of websites wasn’t easy, but summing them all up to come up with a readable feature proved to be much harder,” noted Marc Nkwame, Daily News Arusha correspondent.

Sylvia Mwehozi is the editor of Mlimani Radio, the student radio station at the University of Dar es Salaam School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She says that the training has made her able to lead her students as their practical tutor to make more use of the internet in their work.

Asked to make suggestions on how to improve the training, most participants wished that the training would last a few days longer. Some also suggested that the training would be arranged somewhere outside Dar es Salaam.

Many also mentioned that it was nice to work together with such a charming class. From my side, I can only agree. Therefore, many thanks to all the participants for the hard work and dedication, for all debates and other active involvement.

Many thanks also to Cecilia Mng’ong’o from MISA Tanzania for facilitating the whole training. Thanks to Andrew Marawiti for all the pre-training arrangements. Thanks again also to the IT support at TaGLA as well as the catering which provided good meals for lunch and tasty tea at the morning breaks with the necessary mandazi and other bites.