slimcony on change Tanzania: Migongano baina ya wazanzibari na watanganyika hai...

slimcony on change Tanzania: Migongano baina ya wazanzibari na watanganyika hai...: Interraction baina ya wazanzibari na watanganyika haikuanza baada ya muungano mwaka 1964. Kwa mujibu ya wazee waliotutangulia, wanadai, hapo...

Volunteerism and Philanthropy in Tanzania

Recently I was honored to be part of a unique philanthropic action of Flaviana Matata when she donated 500 life vests to the government agency – Marine Services Limited in Mwanza. What struck me was that this young girl was taking a different approach from her peers and even others. Usually our philanthropists who would raise funds from others or be guests of honors and buy auctioned items etc. But the fact that Flaviana personally ordered the life vests paid for everything until the delivery of the life vests to Mwanza makes this action unique. It shows a very focused and personal involvement in her charity activity. And that got me thinking.

If Flaviana would not have acquired the true spirit of volunteerism from her time as Miss Universe Tanzania she would probably have continued to look at any charity activity as simply making an event and raising funds. So philanthropy is volunteerism taken to a higher level once the individual is in position to spend not only his/her time but money as well. But the dedication, involvement and focus have to remain in order to make any philanthropy matter.

One of the most important thing that we need to instill in our young ones is the spirit of volunteerism. This has to be nurtured and cannot be forced. It is important also that when steering the young ones toward taking on volunteer actions that they should have a personal dedication to the given cause. We cannot force them to be active in environment when they do not understand or truly identify with the cause.

But most importantly is that we need to make them understand that volunteerism does not involve any financial or material gain. It is done for achieving the objective of the cause and nothing more. The earlier we instill this in them the better – before they learn what money can buy and before their head is filled by us that ‘nothing is for free in life’

Health awareness and Media

Today I attended a meeting named: “The Promotion of Health Awareness in Tanzania through Media” organized by international media namely RFI, Deutsche Welle, VOA, PRB and Broadcasting Board of Governors. It was a well attended meeting and many interesting inputs, however I had two important observations that I wanted to share with you all.

First and most important is “Who is driving the agenda on health?” Oftentimes we hear as we did today that “health news in media does not sell.” For this reason, all of us in the media tend to seek a ‘partner’ who will fund such stories because we claim, covering it from our own budget is “not worth it”. For this reason we find that often the agenda is driven by the donors and government who fund such programs for one reason or another. What we end up with is stories and reports that reflect such agenda thus a regular viewer may face a barrage of news about HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria or whichever disease or health issue is the ‘trendy’ topic among the donors and other funding bodies. Naturally stories like these do NOT sell because the primary audience is not the viewer or reader or listener but the funding party. IMHO

In order to make health news interesting and sellable, we need to come up with programs, articles, reports that focus on the viewers, readers and listeners. Health is important to everyone and I am convinced that however ‘poor’ we may deem a common mwananchi, they are ready to pay whatever they have, for good health. As we know and probably have seen, heard or experienced, in the unfortunate case of disease people are ready to sell assets and spend their wealth to regain health. Now if we can device an exchange whereby people are able to get information albeit for a small fee then immediately health related news and information will become not only sellable but ‘hot-selling commodity’ IMHO

Now of course this begs the question – how can we do that? I certainly have some ideas but of course in the spirit of this new shift – nothing is for free ;-)  

It has been a while since I posted anything here but as they say "better late than never"
So from today I promise more frequent updates and stop being boring. One of the reasons for the slow update is that I find Twitter and Facebook more gratifying because I get instance feedback to my tweets and posts, however the limitation of words etc is also frustrating. I guess the time has come to become more used to blogging and keep it lively! Cheers!