By Uyapo Majahana

Why did you apply for the Jamlab Accelerator Programme?

We applied for the programme because we found it an awesome opportunity to cement the decolonial media work that we began with Roger Williams University’s year-long fellowship in transformative approaches to journalism for educators of teenage journalists.

While we may have support from this institution with regards to the pedagogical and educational practices related to community-driven, solutions-oriented, reparatory, engaged, and empowering, among other transformative journalism approaches, we believe the Jamlab Accelerator Programme will go a step further with the support structure that relates to both training in entrepreneurial skills and a network that can be accessed locally while also being rooted in the local communities’ culture and history.

What does your start-up do?

We train young people from marginalised communities (migrants) on media production including but not limited to multimedia news, features, investigations, and other media art individually or in collaboration with other community members. We also give them the platforms to tell their stories.

What makes your organisation unique?

Instead of telling our community what is important, our journalism approach upholds that we learn from them and go find useful and meaningful solutions and information in the format that best attends to their needs. Our goal is to bring added value to a community by interacting and working with them towards finding ways to address issues by identifying the solutions that have been implemented to see how they are working and their limitations. Our focus on the migrant communities also sets us apart from most media enterprises.

Who is your target audience?

While teenage migrants are our primary audience, migrants from all age groups might find our content resonating with them. People from all over Africa who may have experienced migration, or might have friends or relatives who might have gone through a similar experience are also within the scope of our audience projections.

What issue/problem do you want to solve through the Jamlab Accelerator Programme?

The media does not adequately represent the voices of migrant youth in South Africa and resultantly there are no new/inspiring conversations/narratives being initiated about migrant youth in the media.

What are you hoping to gain from the Jamlab Accelerator Programme?

From the programme, we hope to gain fundamental insights about media entrepreneurship and insights that we would utilise in setting up a sustainable and impactful media venture. In that regard, we lavish the opportunity to network and collaborate with other media experts through this programme. We also hope that this experience will provide us with a key to unlock investors’ doors in different ways.

Uyapo Majahana is the co-founder of Afro Communities of Hope and has been selected as one of the seven teams on the Jamlab Accelerator Programme.


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