Journey of a Thousand Miles

By: Edem Djokotoe | 06/15/2010

Editors Note: The blog sums up what I will be expected to do in Malawi as outlined at the week-long orientation session at the ICFJ in Washington DC

My journey to an Africa Development Journalism Fellowship in Malawi started with a significant first step in Washington. It kicked off from a prestigious location less than five minutes' walk from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, better known to the world as The White House.

Even as I write US President Barack Obama is in the Oval Office probably trying to figure out how to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and deal with the environmental fall-out from the disaster has caused. Thankfully, my brief, as a Fellow, is a lot less onerous than his.

The Fellowship should see me working out Blantyre, the administrative capital of Malawi, a country where almost 60 per cent of the 10 million people live in abject poverty.The Nation, the country’s biggest circulation private daily, will be my hosts for the duration of the 18 months I will be down there.

I am heading to this small southern African country in a trying time in the newspaper’s life—a time when government, the largest advertiser, has pulled out all its advertising from the Nation, in a bid to cripple the company financially and to punish it for being critical of the political establishment.

Against the backdrop of the Malawian government’s heavy-handedness, I will be required to build the capacity of a total of 40 journalists to consistently and sustainably cover news and issues that seldom get to make the headlines--rural development, agriculture, poverty, water and sanitation.

Working with local media training institutions, I should extend the skills development to journalists in other organisations.By the end of the Fellowship, I should also have trained a cadre of citizen journalists in the country to support the proposed editorial intervention.

Quite a plateful, but the good thing is that the Nation’s Executive Editor, Towani Gondwe and her management team have thrown their support firmly behind the Fellowship and have pledged to ensure that its objectives are met.

Of course, there will be challenges, but if the managerial goodwill that has been shown so far is anything to go by, then I should have a fruitful time working in Malawi and enjoying what has got to be the best lake fish in the world. Chambo, this fish is called in Cewa, one of the local languages.

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