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Working with ZANIS to enhance civic education in Zambia
The Zambia News and Information Service (ZANIS) is a department of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Services. It was formed in 2005 following the merger of the Zambia News Agency (ZANA) and the Zambia Information Services (ZIS). Like ZANA its predecessor, ZANIS concentrates on Zambian development activities taking place around the country. It services the Zambian media as subscribers and fills in the gap left by the commercially inclined and urban concentrated media. AgriVisual has been working with ZANIS and its predecessor organisations over a number of years and now has supplied over 80 vehicles, to support the ZANIS network of regional offices and information centres across the country. With such a large order it made sense to set up a temporary factory in Zambia. All the base components were shipped out from AgriVisual's workshops in Eversley to the Ministry HQ in Lusaka. AgriVisual production staff were at hand to supervise assembly in-country.
Although the headquarters of the agency is in Lusaka, it also has a string of regional offices across the country in Kabwe (Central Province), Ndola (Copperbelt Province), Mansa (Luapula Province), Kasama (Northern Province), Chipata (Eastern Province), Livingstone (Southern Province), Mongu (Western Province) and Solwezi (North Western Province). The majority of these regional offices are in rural Zambia where 70 per cent of the country's population is concentrated. They are staffed by a well trained cadre of journalists and information officers. This means that ZANIS has the best reach of any media organisation in Zambia and has become a major "media-mix producer of news text, photographs, radio and TV footage and video documentaries".
With its production capabilities, regional staff and information dissemination resources in place, ZANIS has become the channel of choice for spreading development messages to farmers and their families. Their 80-strong fleet of AV ANNOUNCERS is the main tool for spreading the message and news gathering. Two of the key topics are HIV/AIDS and civic education. For HIV/AIDS, much of the emphasis is now on caring for infected people living in the community, but this requires a lot of sensitisation to overcome stigma even before practical palliative measures can be put in place. Information staff have been using their AV ANNOUNCERS constantly, to change the way communities think about the disease and make living with HIV/AIDS more bearable.
Civic education efforts have largely focused on improving local participation in the democratic processes and institutions. As elections are held the AV ANNOUNCERS have encouraged people to register and vote, so that their representatives have a credible mandate in district and national government.
With such a large fleet of vehicles in place, ZANIS now has an opportunity to set up an integrated information gathering and dissemination network and AgrVisual has been working closely with ZANIS to see how this vision of AV HUB can be best realised. Using the fleet to gather material and disseminate messages, opens up the possibility of enhanced sharing of information between communities and even better coverage of rural affairs in the national news.
Tel: +44 1189 734774 Fax: +44 1189 730002 Email: info@agrivisual.com