The Africa Media Festival will take place on February 14th and 15th 2023 at Radisson Blu Hotel, Nairobi.
The two-day event, themed “Re-imagine Media”, will bring together thought leaders in the media industry from across the continent.
The festival will endeavor to deliberate on how media houses can reinvent the way they produce, distribute and monetize their content. The pan-African conference targets different stakeholders in the media industry including investors and governments.
Additionally, the stakeholders will ventilate on the future of media in Africa post-Covid-19. In 2020, Motswana media entrepreneur and scholar Alvin Ntibinyane predicted that: “Post COVID-19, major independent news organisations in big economies like South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria will be hard hit. Depending on how long the crisis persists and on individual cases, newspapers are going to lose between 15 per cent and 55 per cent in advertisement revenue in 2020. It could get worse.”
“There is no such thing as African media just like there is no Asian media but rather Chinese or Indian media; and no European media but rather British or German media. Therefore, a limitation that must be conceded to is that discourse on African media must be alive to geographical, economic and even political contexts of each polity. A broad-brush outlook of the media in Africa would be misleading because the pandemic affects different countries uniquely,” Ugandan writer and lawyer Ivan Okuda argues.
Some of speakers at the event will include John Allan-Namu of Africa Uncensored and Baraza Media Lab curator Christine Mungai.