EVENTS / NEWS: Media conference for youth (AFRICA)

LONDON – An international conference has been organised to explore the role that children and young people should play in the African media and is set to be held on March 11 and 12, 2011. The theme of the event is ‘Children’s and Young People’s Media in Africa: Evolving Markets, Producers and Audiences’ and the conference team includes, among others, Peter Goodwin, Brilliant Mhlanga and Helen Cohen.

It is widely believed that the mass media have taken over the role of storytelling, something which traditionally was performed by grandmothers and grandfathers in most of Africa. If so, who today are storytellers in Africa? What stories do they tell, when, where and with what effect to children and young people? The answers to these questions are not clearly established because there is currently not much information about how children and young people in Africa are targeted by the mass media.

The organisers have called for papers to be submitted that deal with production and reception strategies for children’s and young people’s media in Africa. Papers are invited on media in the whole continent of Africa: north, south, east and west, whether individual countries, groups of countries or the regions of North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

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