Events

Last week the Freedom Fone team completed a training hosted by the DW Akademie. The training focused on how to script, record and edit good quality audio for a variety of appropriate formats including: Vox Pops, news stories and explanation pieces. All files need to be audible and clear to callers using mobile phones.

Having lived through the hyperinflation years in Zimbabwe, you would be forgiven for assuming that I'd be inured to biggish numbers. Not so. Tunisians have the unusual practice of adding an extra zero to the decimals following their numbers. So 127.000 Dinar is actually 127.00 Dinar in the Zimbabwean numbering system - not 1,270.

The award ceremony for the 2012 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize was held at the Presidential Palace in Tunis on May 3.

L to R: Stewart Chisholm, Open Society Foundations Media Program; Mark Whitehouse, IREX; Kathleen M. Fitzpatrick, U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Freedom Fone & Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe have won the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award 2012!

Upenyu Makoni-Muchemwa was in London last night to receive the Innovation Award that recognises the original use of new technology to circumvent censorship and foster debate, argument or dissent. 

An Ignite presentation of Freedom Fone for Crisis Reporting was made by Fran Boon at the CDAC organised Media & Tech Fair in London March 22, 2012. 

Wow, it’s hot in Dar, and this is winter in Tanzania. My ankles are swollen and it helps to sleep with a fan on at night. The city seems to be booming...buildings are going up in the city centre, bill boards compete for consumer shillings and the morning rush hour(s) is a force to be reckoned with. The most prominent products for sale are mobile related services – Tigo, Airtel (previously Zain) and Vodacom compete through vibrant advertising for a share of this lucrative market. Thanks to the competition, call and SMS costs have become very affordable in Tanzania.

The AMARC10 conference held in November 2010 in La Plata, Buenos Aires brought together a colourful cross-section of people, places and passions. Plenary sessions provided a platform for theory, philosophy and utopian imagining. Workshops rooted the conference in the real world of illiteracy, intolerance, poverty, crisis, community, co-operation and hope.

A big up to Farm Radio International's Nelly Bassily, for helping Freedom Fone to squeeze a workshop into the busy agenda at AMARC10 in La Plata, Buenos Aires today.

Nelly's networking and linguistic prowess delivered a meeting room equipped with projector and professional simultaneous translation in Spanish. She handily filled the role of impromptu simultaneous French translator, making it possible for many more people to follow my presentation.