Final Presentation

This is our presentation:

PR in Africa

Blogging as a learning experience

As a first-time-blogger I have gained a totally new experience. When we started I had no idea where this process would lead. I learned that blogging (at least for this course purpose) required overall planning, background work, structuring your thoughts, techniques and thinking about how to make it easy-to-read and appealing for the readers.

However the most striking discovery was that blogging is sharing information AND opinions IN dialogue. It sounds simple, but it means a lot. It’s not enough if I just write a great summary of history with some links. In addition I have to find an interesting point of view and write it short and sweet that someone is willing to sacrifice their time to read it. Then starts the two-way communication part. Someone comments my post and I want to comment in a way that provides value for the dialogue.

I’m grateful that we kind of had a ready made virtual community with motivation (or Kaja’s order ;) ) to interact. I learned a lot from others’ comments and commenting others. One-way communication would have felt very poor. So thank you my blogmates.

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.

Last but not least

It's the last week of our course and tomorrow our blog will be four weeks old :)
I was the first one to post here, and now I start wrapping it up. With our last postings, we all will try to answer two questions:
a) What did we find out about PR in Africa?
b) What did we learn from blogging?

When I think of our first lecture, I remember I was almost speechless and probably rolling my eyes when we were told that during next four weeks our task will be blogging on public relations in Africa. I had no idea how we would be able to do this!!! PR and Africa!!! Now when I look at our blog and my own postings, I am happy to see the result, but at the same time I can also say that the time was far too short to cover all different topics, issues and ideas that I came across while searching for the material. I concentrated on PR in South Africa, and among other things I learned, I consider the approach that one could find traces of PR in the traditions of South Africa that are centuries old to be the most interesting one. 


From the point of view of blogging, I think I learned most from reading the blogs of other groups. I didn't read the blogs just for entertainment (blogs are usually "easy reading" or entertainment for me) but tried to analyze them (being inspired by Kaja who emphasized several times that a message has to be created keeping receiver(s) in mind). Whenever I found something I really liked, I asked myself various questions - why I like it? what makes it special? how it is different from messages that are "normal"?. And I did the same when I saw something that seemed strange or even annoying (later didn't happen often). I think that it has helped me in creating my own messages, and I am also aware that there is still room for improvement :)

Photo from here

Findings of the search of PR in Ethiopia

How to prove when it’s hard to find proofs? We westerners always like to measure and rank and analyse. UK-based Gyroscope consultancy has created an “Africa Communication Index” ACI, to measure the extent and effectiveness that PR can be conducted in different African countries. Well here’s a fact for you - Ethiopia scores 22.51 out of 100. (In comparison Kenya scores 68.77, Egypt 80.92 and South-Africa 89.35. Source: The Global Public Relations Handbook, p 301 307)

So there is very little scientific PR in Ethiopia. I would call it some kind of pre-stage of PR and Grunig would call it one-way pressagentry/publicity model (lecture notes: Developments of PR processes). There is just no need for academic PR concept in most of the Ethiopians’ lives. Majority of the population in are still tackling with their basic needs. When people lack their basic needs, such as water and shelter, they simply cannot be interested in some organizations image and reputation. I guess Public Relations means Personal Relations in Ethiopia.

Also other society related factors effect on the stage of PR. Political factors are unstable, democracy is debatable and the government controls the media. There is both political and organizational corruption. There is a huge diversity of social and cultural factors. Ethiopia was never really colonized as other African countries, besides Liberian. Thus Ethiopia doesn’t even have mother country’s effects on PR history or its help in PR’s development either.

Nevertheless the future might bring some changes. The Economist magazine predicts Ethiopia as 4th fastest economy for 2009. Managed PR exist already in big international companies with excellent PR resources and their rich and educated stakeholders who have purchasing power. Addis Ababa University has a Faculty of Journalism and communications. When the GDP grows the Faculty’s web page contents may change from “Lorem ipsum” text to something else. LinksAmazon that advertises “Be the First to Register and List your Website for free in Marketing and Advertising - Public Relations Ethiopia category” may get registers.
And APRA may get its Ethiopian public relations professional association.

My search of the PR in Ethiopia has ended with this blog, but this search has raised my interest and I’ll be following the developments. I hope you’ll keep me company. Dähna hunu!

Media and PR Challenges during Colonial Times

What has not yet been touched in this blog is the fact that most African states are old colonies of European countries. This post is based on an article that can be found in Kaja’s blog.

Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) ended up under the administration of the British Colonial Office in 1923. In the colonial times, communications were managed by the means of print, film, and radio. These are a few ways in which the Colonial Office tried to tackle the challenges that African PR faced (and still faces today), namely illiteracy and the multitude of different languages and dialects.

Print

The Northern Rhodesian administration started to produce a government newspaper for Africans in 1936. This was done in an effort to manage communication primarily with African miners. The paper was called Mutende (meaning “peace” in the Bemba language), and it was designed for an African population of 1,366,00 of which 10% were literate. The paper was published in simple English and in the four African languages – Bemba, Nyanja, Lozi, and Tonga – spoken by the largest groups of people. Mutende contained global and local news and articles, sport, a women’s page, a health page, a children’s page, competitions, job and commercial advertisements, English lessons and letters from Africans. The paper was criticised about it not allowing its readers full freedom of expression as their letters concerning chiefs, Europeans and the government were not published. Nonetheless, the paper provided a platform for new opinion leaders, the educated Africans to demonstrate their language and polemical skills and also acted as a long-term agent of change, inducting its readers into the social norms of western society.

Film

Africans on the Copperbelt had been exposed to Hollywood entertainment films since 1928, while the British Colonial Office had also been interested in the use of films in adult education since 1927. Adult education was a popular topic in the 1930s, and there were positive experiences from mass education programmes elsewhere that urged the British to take on this endeavour. They saw both films and broadcasting as ways of “spreading thought among the natives” and overcoming the challenge of illiteracy. Cinema was designed to help the illiterate Africans to adjust to the coming of Western capitalist society with its alien social and economic standards.

Radio

During WW2 only a few Africans had access to radios and numerous technical troubles interfered with transmission, which caused broadcasting to be essentially experimental. Most listened in on communal sets; at the end of WW2 there were approximately 200-300 community receivers in welfare halls, and bomas throughout the country. Halls were crowded and noisy, and the programme in each language did not last longer than 7-10 minutes before it was repeated in another language. There was still enthusiasm about the potential of radio for mass education after WW2. By 1950, broadcasting hours had reached 24.5 hrs a week with programmes being transmitted in six of the main languages.


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Smyth, R. (2000). The Genesis of Public Relations in British Colonial Practice. In Public Relations Review 27 (2001), pp. 149-161.