Abidjan Blog Camps Launches ‘Blog Your Holidays’ Campaign

Rising Voices grantee Abidjan Blog Camps has recently launched a blog outreach campaign targeting the teenagers from high schools of Ivory Coast. The ‘blog your holidays’ workshop will be held for two weeks. In the first week the students will receive training on citizen journalism and how to blog. On the second week they will search materials for their posts which will be published simultaneously in their own blogs and the project blog. During the second week they will also receive a book from an Ivorian writer to work on a review. They will be able to question the author. The best review will be awarded.

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From its new project blog:

The theme for the exercise of our students is the story of their school holidays. They tell their environment, their readings, their interests. They share their stories, their photos and video.

The “blog your holidays” is part of the “AbidjanBlogCamps. The “AbidjanBlogCamps” revolves around two axes:

- A framework for training the use of social media (blogs, podcasts, social networks, etc …), open to various associations, professions, schools and youth groups in the district of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) .

- A blog that will serve as a practice ground and exposure to various communities that will be formed.

Teenagers are on vacation the first target of the initiative for two reasons:

- They are often already familiar with the Internet, with use often focused on themselves.

- They are enthusiastic and can encourage their parents to look at Web 2.0.

(Machine translation)

The post also calls for potential students who can register for free just by mailing to abidjanblogcamps[at]gmail.com.

Théophile Kouamouo, the project leader, informed earlier via an email:

We are working on the national PR campaign about blogging. We are writing a booklet and we will use this booklet to organize something like an offline buzz. With this booklet, we will explain to the community leaders the importance of blogs and convince them to send their communities to our workshops. We will also make a press conference.

We hope that with these efforts they will be able to find the intended number of enthusiastic participants.

Théophile also informs that Nadine Kouamouo, president of I3C (Information and Communication for Behavior Change) will coordinate the campaign. Théophile is also authoring a blogging guide in collaboration with Manasseh Deheer.

There was an interesting article in Africa2.0 blog describing the lack of videos uploaded from African countries (except South Africa, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria). There are some videos on Africa in Video sharing sites like YouTube but those are mostly uploaded by the diaspora. The blog discusses the reason why:

Indeed very few videos are made by Africans on the issues of the continent. With all the scenes of daily life, events, comedy series that pass on the local channels do not provide all perspectives and there are issues missing. This lack may be explained by the fact that very few Africans have digital cameras to make videos, although some phones offer the possibility of capturing scenes of everyday life with reasonable quality. Also it is not easy to upload a 100MB video with the available slow networks. Except from selected African countries, many lack access to ADSL. But where people are lucky enough to have access to broadband there are interested users that are emerging on the continent. (Machine Translation)

As Abidjan Blog camp will also have video making and sharing in their curriculum we hope that the above issue will be addressed properly.

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