BBC Hausa has launched a multimedia initiative which will help generate content from Nigeria’s rural audiences, focusing on issues that matter to them and on their needs.
As part of the Your News In Your Palms (Labarinku A Tafinku) initiative, starting tomorrow, Friday 21 August, listeners in six Northern Nigerian villages will be using the mobile phones provided to them by BBC Hausa to send to a dedicated BBC Hausa phone number their views and reports about themselves and developments in their communities.
The initiative also encourages them to use the BBC Hausa mobile phones to send pictures to the BBC. A selection of these images will be published on the BBC Hausa website, bbchausa.com, and the BBC Hausa page on the social networking site, Facebook.
At this stage, Your News In Your Palms connects with the Northern Nigerian village communities of Daba, Fadibara, Godar Ali, Induku, Sakarma and Sayori.
The initiative will expand across Northern Nigeria as well as to Niger and the Hausa-speaking areas of Northern Cameroon and Northern Ghana.
Head of BBC Hausa, Jamilah Tangaza, explains: “There has been a technological as well as a cultural shift in the way our audiences get and share their news. At BBC Hausa, we have been repositioning our offer on multiple platforms to better serve these changes and the needs of our audiences.
“Your News In Your Palms means we are taking our relationship with them to a new level – and, in fact, networking with them.”
The six village communities that have joined the initiative were among the ones BBC Hausa connected with during the Village Roadshow last March.
Jamilah Tangazah hopes that Your News In Your Palms will also help village communities across the wider region to forge closer relationships with each another, with BBC Hausa serving as a channel and a moderator of this conversation.
Jamilah says: “Seeing the benefits of such a relationship, other village communities will be keen to partner with us as they, too, will like to share their stories on the BBC and through the BBC.
“It is our strong belief that this will help enhance cross-fertilisation of ideas and the promotion of general debate and democratic values.”
This looks like a great idea! I do hope that these phones were distributed in such a way as to represent more than one religious group so as to give a more balanced perspective than has usually been reported.
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i blieve this is a good initiative, i hope it will be expanded to more remote areas of northen nigeria, jamilah tangazah is doing well,bravo bbchausa.
Jamilah i hope you are doin fine i will like to use this oppourtunity to achieve what iwant espicially my side.tanx
I found a link to above information in Yahoo. Paers
This is a laudable project, I hope it goes to the targeted communities.
‘Labarinku a tafinku’ or ‘News in your palms’ is actually a very good initiative coming once more from the BBC. Kudos to Jamila Tangaza. My humble suggestion is that BBC should take a good look at the make up of Northern Nigeria & provide same initiative to other villages who are not indigenously hausa speaking in north. Today, hausa is the lingua franca of Northern Nigeria comprising of over 250 ethnic groups with most practcing Islam or Christianity as religion while some others practice Traditional religions. We want to hear about the different lifestyles of the people that makes the North culturally rich.
I hope this program will be extended to other town like zaria especially tudun wada where zaria edicationist youth are living we have meaning invention to show outside Nigeria.
kudos to bbchausa, u people are doing a great job. Jamilah, may Allah reward you and your teams for such laudable project.
Jamila beautiful job alhamdulillah u succeeded in making d hausa service one of d dynamic media service in d world of communication. May ALLAH S.W give u more wisdom to be of help to your country. We are really proud of u jamila and members. welldone.