Mediaworks, South Africa
Sean Hawkey
Mediaworks’ main aim is to provide trainees with the opportunity for employment, to assist communities to set up and run their own community media projects and to empower civil society organisations to acquire better communications skills and media production techniques. Mediaworks provides courses in photography and dark room skills, dance, computer skills including internet, painting, pottery, social communication and management skills; access to equipment; capacity building for community based initiatives; basic media training for high school students and a grassroots social marketing campaign on HIV/AIDS awareness in 2001
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Bukelwa Vokonobatana of Mediaworks, South Africa
The convergence of telecommunications, computers and broadcasting are making it possible for community media to explore the potential of new media. The strategic use of ICTs by community media groups has a number of benefits. Community media is in a position to access information and to repackage it in ways that are more accessible to the community through popular forms of dissemination such as community radio and print media. Electronic networking facilitates cheap and effective networking, information dissemination, exchange and cooperation.
Other projects being run by Mediaworks include a Gender and Communications Project that empowers community-based gender activists as communicators and facilitators. Also the High Schools Media Project aims to introduce media to high school students in order to build their communication capacity, increase their understanding of media issues and encourage them to express their opinions.
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