Tanzania’s AMLC

I don’t normally put up press releases, but since I’m involved in this conference, I thought you might be interested. I went to the one last year in Ghana, which was extremely useful, especially in terms of setting up contacts with online practitioners in other African countries. Also, I know you’ll laugh at the ‘leading media executives’ bit. Well, if you know me.

African Media Chiefs to Discuss Sustainable Business Models at Annual Summit

JOHANNESBURG, September 2 – Leading African media executives are preparing to meet in Tanzaniafrom 26-29 September for the 2010 edition of the Africa Media Leadership Conference (AMLC). This year’s summit will focus on identifying and developing “Sustainable Media Business Models in the Digital Age”.

The AMLC series – now in its ninth year – is the foremost pan-African gathering of senior media professionals, and the gathering represents a key opportunity for Africa’s most influential media leaders to discuss strategic, operational and other challenges in a fast and constantly changing media landscape.

A shot of the decapitated statue of Nkrumah in Ghana, where last year's AMLC conference was held.

Since its inception in 2002, the meetings have developed into an annual high-level forum for strategy formulation, networking and sharing by senior executives of print, broadcast, online and converged media on the African continent.

The conference is co-hosted by Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership (SPI) and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), and was convened to promote high-level interaction among Africa’s media chiefs.

“This year we switch focus from a broad look at understanding and doing digital media in Africa to specifics of what works and what does not work under African conditions,” said SPI Director Francis Mdlongwa.

Frank Windeck, the director of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Sub-Sahara Africa Media Programme, the sponsor of the AMLC series, said: “These meetings provide Africa’s top media people with a unique opportunity to network at the highest level, debating  key industry challenges, while seeking practical solutions by examining case studies drawn from Africa.”

The conference meets annually in an African country, and past AMLC summits have debated timely topics such as “Managing Media in a Recession” (Mauritius, 2002); “South Meets East: Strategic Challenges for African Media” (Nairobi, Kenya, 2006); and “Learning  from the Future: Africa’s Media Map in 2029” (Accra, Ghana, 2009).

Issued by:

SPI Director Francis Mdlongwa (email: f.mdlongwa@ru.ac.za; mobile phone +27-(0) 83-629-2312; office phone +27-(0) 46-603-8781; fax  +27-(0) 46-622-9591)

KAS Director Media Programme for Sub-Sahara Africa Frank Windeck (email: Frank.Windeck@kas.de;  office phone +27-(0) 11-214-2900)

1. 

   Lisa Vives says:

   October 5, 2010 at 6:47 pm

   Referring to the Africa Media Leadership Conference: do we really benefit from a conference that isolates us from our counterparts in other parts of the world? I have the impression that foreign funders want an African media confab to be narrowly focused while all the other media conferences around the world encourage the building of networks and sharing of resources. I wonder if it doesn’t reflect a paternalism by these funders and whether this is actually the choice of the African media execs who attend. This could also explain why the alternative images of Africa rarely escape the confines of the continent.
2. 

   Chris says:

   October 6, 2010 at 9:02 am

   We definitely benefit, and the conference doesn’t isolate us. It’s not as if one conference is going to isolate us – we can just attend others with European or North American delegates. And being at a conference with 15 or 20 countries represented is, in effect, global – these are very different countries, not all generically ‘African’. And if we’re looking at local conditions for the media, we’re very different to European etc media. Last point – many of us at the conference had worked on other continents, so there was that experience as well.
3. 

   fnd says:

   October 20, 2010 at 1:40 pm

   Hmm, that statue could represent the state of SA media soon.