Mdegela

Mdegela is project coordinator and assistant lecturer of the Mass Communication department at the Tumaini University of Dar es Salaam (TuDarCo). TuDarCo and Hanze worked together on the Nuffic TMT+ project from 2020 till 2023 to create a short-term journalism degree for journalists working in the field, who need to obtain a mandatory degree to keep publishing.

“One of the things that we acquired were online skills, for online journalism. We don’t have any experience in that and now we were able to include the different types of writing necessary for online media. Writing for newspapers and Twitter for example, is very different. For Twitter you have to condense the text much more and we were given techniques on how to do that.”

“In Tanzania people use newspaper, radio, tv mostly. There are online newspapers and online radio and it is expanding more. The transition is now and we are able to prepare our students for this in the future.”

“My mindset has changed in the project. We were trying to teach our students skills, but we have learned from the project, that we can link our students to the companies via projects and they can solve real life problems for the companies and obtain real life skills.”

“We are working on setting up our own news channel, managed and created by students. In the project we worked well together with the University of Iringa, maybe we can work together with the news channels too, like switching to our reporter in Iringa and vice versa! We are brothers and sisters now.”