Children’s Voices Foundation

The Children’s Media Week sessions are interactive, participatory and practical, designed to tap into each participants’ unique contribution. The programme has 30 participants aged between 10 and 14 and drawn from diverse backgrounds. The Media Week comprises of three different sessions: screening session, hands on video and animation training workshops, a studio visit and the child rights workshop.

The screening sessions involve the participants watching several programmes from all over the world. They are then followed by discussion sessions after the screenings, where children discuss issues such as the appropriateness of the programme culturally and age-wise, relevance of the message and if they feel their views and opinions have been taken into consideration. The programes are also used to engage the children on discussions on their rights as children and specifically their right to participation.

“Sara, an animated cartoon character, is portrayed as an energetic and intelligent young girl who has to make important life decisions, such as whether to stay in school or how to deal with difficult adults. Through the narratives, she emerges as a role model and a heroine of girls’ empowerment in Africa, helping young women make the transition into adulthood. The Sara episodes generates relevant and educational content for discussions on key issues affecting adolescent girls, such as HIV/AIDS, the unequal workloads of boys and girls, teenage pregnancy, sexual abuse and early marriage.”

The programme has one-day hands on multimedia workshops for video and animation. Through these workshops the project organisers intend to empower the participants to such an extent that they can use these as tools in advancing their own agenda and to be critical and intelligent users of various forms of media rather than to be totally mesmerised and powerless. Children from the Plan International Children’s Video Project conduct the Video workshop.

The children are taken to fully operational television and radio studios at the Kenya Institute of Education for planned visits . The organisers say participants are able to experience the operations behind what they see and hear on television and radio. The children are also given a chance to share their insights with adult producers and other stakeholders.

Children

The project organisers hope to not only demystify the media waves, but also empower the children to feel confident enough to “own” and use media to advance their own rights and other issues. They hope that the children will be able to utilise this avenue of information dissemination to the benefit of their peers. The project’s hopes include:

• acting as a perfect preamble for the International Children’s Day of Broadcasting
• bringing together media professionals, NGO activists, children representatives and the Government to interact on child-rights led media agenda
• providing a forum for child to child and child to adult approaches to development
• allowing for the formation of new partnerships and initiatives
• creating an opportunity for strategising new and united approaches to getting children’s voices heard