Youth Voice Journalism Academy

Last week I spent some time with some of the journalists of the Youth Voice Journalism Academy. One of my deliverables of these 6 weeks in South Africa is to evaluate this project that now runs for almost a year. The aim of the project is to inspire the whole community into taking action to improve the future of their young people. The Youth Voice Journalism Academy (YVJA) consists of an annual curriculum that trains the young people with journalism skills, in order to develop literacy, accountability, self-confidence and leadership, whilst engaging the young adults in constructive activity. The YVJA aspires to inspire the whole community by writing articles about relevant news or topics that concern the community or by the video dairies that the participants make which tell about their lives in Munsieville.

Last week I met some of the participants of this YVJA. One year ago 20 young adults from Munsieville started this training. Some of them got jobs, moved or just dropped out and by mid October, 10 of them will complete their curriculum. I met some very ambitious and talented participants (see picture). They are willing to make the best out of it and are searching for ways to create more awareness in the community. They showed me their portfolio and I was really impressed by the quality of their work. Palesa was even asked by Caxton magazines to write an article for their magazine. She wrote an article on the origin of the word “kaffer”, which nowadays is frequently by young children as a curse word but they have no clue where this word originates from. With the article, Palesa is trying to make the children aware so that they can rethink when they use this word.

The students also made a HipHop magazine "Element" that looks very professional and trendy and is over 40 pages thick!! They are eager to have this printed and have plans to discuss it with Caxton magazines, one of the companies they visited during their monthly site visits. This company has no magazine yet for young adults and this could be the first one and more important this could be the first magazine coming from Munsieville.



The Young Journalists (from the left: Tschepang, Articia, ik, Palesa en "Bucs")



The students indicated to me that they find it very difficult to create awareness about their work in the community and I challenged them to think of it and have a discussion on their thoughts the next day. Thursday when I met them again they displayed great ideas about creating a monthly newsletter and to organize an exposition of their work for the community! I felt sad for one of them who told me that her parents haven’t seen here work up to now since she has no computer of her own to show them. I think that the journalists I met last week do have talent and do belief that they can improve life for the youth and young children in their community. With the right encouragement and support Project Hope UK will be able to support these young ambitious journalists to achieve their goals and make their vision come true!!