African mobile journalism project launches

A project aimed at training, paying and providing advanced mobile phone equipment to African journalists will launch today in four separate countries.

Voices of Africa will provide reporters in South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana, and Kenya with state-of-the-art mobile phones to enhance their reporting capabilities allowing them to capture stories on the handheld devises and upload them to a designated news site.

The project is backed by the Africa Interactive Media Foundation and Dutch citizen journalism website Skoeps has supplied the mobile technology and the publishing platform allowing mobile reporters to submit work to the Voices of Africa area of Africanews.com.

Complete packages, video footage and stills captured by the reporters on their mobiles will then be sold on to agencies, television stations, and newspapers to help finance the scheme.

"GPRS is present in all the countries we are working in now; in South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana, and in Kenya," Hidde Kross, Skoeps vice-president, told Journalism.co.uk.

"What we do at Skoeps is use a mobile page which can be viewed on phones or on an ordinary web browser. Modern phones with internet connectivity can find this mobile website and there you can directly upload images.

"So there is no need to use MMS, just mobile internet."

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