TMF grantees attend academy on quality and sustainability

Tanzania Media Fund (TMF) began a Transformation Academy for seven of its institutional grantees on Tuesday, October 7, 2014 at Kunduchi Hotel in Dar es Salaam. The grantees attending the academy are Jamhuri Media Ltd (Dar es Salaam), Daraja Development (Njombe), Kahama FM Stereo Radio (Kahama), Pesa time – Mpakasi.com (Dar es Salaam), Standard Radio Voices Ltd (Singida), Kigoma Press Club (Kigoma) and CG FM Radio (Tabora).

The Transformation Academy is the second stage in the implementation of TMF’s contract with these institutional grantees. It follows after the customisation visit, which was conducted immediately after the grantees were contracted in September 2014, in order to determine the structural challenges that TMF would partner with grantees to address.

According to TMF’s Senior Programme Officer (Grants), Alex Kanyambo, the challenges identified during are in three main categories – governance and management, financial stability and quality content production. During the academy, grantees will discuss these structural challenges in greater detail and develop activities that it will implement in the next six months in order to address them.

‘We have been supporting content production in our institutional grantees but it has not been sustainable. That is why we are now pushing this thing called transformation, said TMF director Ernest Sungura, speaking at the opening of the academy.

During the Transformation Academy, grantees will be guided by a team of mentors from both inside and outside the country. Martin Davis and Durosimi Thomas from UK based media company, Between the Posts, will work with Abdul-Razaq Badru and Wence Mushi of Branding Resources to take grantees through the key components of the transformation process. TMF monitoring and evaluation officer Sanne van den Berg, will orient grantees on the importance of monitoring and evaluation. At the end of the three-day academy, on Thursday, October 9, 2014, each organization will have developed a media business transformation strategy and plan.

TMF launched the Transformation Grant in October 2013, with the view to create a type of grant that allows for it to partner with a media organisation for a significant length of time during which it can contribute to structural changes promoting sustainability in the grantee particularly and in the Tanzanian media sector generally.