Lessons Learnt

Like Tiiu, I also felt somewhat dumbfounded when I first heard our group’s topic. Surely there was nothing written about PR in Africa – or even that many attempts at practicing PR on this continent? But gradually, after the initial shock, my attitude changed and the more I researched the more I started having fun, too. I’ve always thought that in order to write a blog one should have an interesting topic that would provoke you to say something fairly often. And here was the chance to do just that with this theme.

For me, blogging was easy. I honestly never had trouble coming up with things to post about Africa or my area of specialisation, Egypt. There is even history of PR in Africa, as I discovered, but in the end the trouble was actually having to choose what to include and exclude. In hindsight, the time was simply too short to do everything.

What I did learn, then, was about all the challenges that African PR practices face. The settings are completely different from Finland, as in Africa you have to deal with many different cultures and religions and with even a greater number of languages and local dialects (not to forget illiteracy, either). These are the ones on top of my mind after this short experience, I’m sure there’d still be lots to discover.