Friday, October 21, 2011

The president of Sweden and three African ladies

We have moved on to real fact-finding and producing stories based on the investigations. First we had a warm-up of some more simple research in order to activate our brains and minds to the more challenging research.

To find out the population of Iringa town, the height of Mount Kilimanjaro and the street address of the Embassy of Finland in Dar es Salaam were yet easy tasks. Populations, geographical and political details and such can usually be found in a Wikipedia article that you would reach just by searching for the name of the place or country. Links to contact information are usually found on the top of the website in the right end of the page, or in a column on the left side of the page, or at the bottom of the page.

So far easy was also to find out who is the current president of Botswana. The task to find out who is the president of Sweden was however a bit more difficult as the country is a monarchy and has a king - with no political power though. The prime minister is the head of the government.

As Tanzanians usually love English football, one search was to find out who is the top goal scorer of the English Premier League at the moment.

Some other assignments, like the current inflation rate in Tanzania (16,8 percent!) and what president Jakaya Kikwete actually said during his speech at a conference in Mpanda in Rukwa region last weekend, seemed to be too challenging for a warm-up. The difficulty was to narrow the search by using alternative Google options, such as Google news, or just to choose search result only from Tanzanian websites.

The rest of the day was spent on finding information about three famous African ladies: Kenyan Nobel peace prize winner and founder of the Green Belt Movement, the late Wangari Maathai; the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo who in her bestselling book Dead Aid suggests that Africa should stop receiving so called development aid as it is in her opinion bad for the economy and causes corruption and dependency; and finally Leila Lopes, the Angolan fresh Miss Universe crowned last month.

Amina Mollel from TBC and Edward Kinabo, subeditor of the newspaper Tanzania Daima, chose to write about the new Miss Universe. Bilham Kimati from Daily News went on to explain the main points of the economist Dambisa Moyo. Wangari Maathai was the most popular topic, chosen by all others. Here’s the story by Felix Mwagara, reporter from Mwananchi newspaper, and here’s another story by Noor Shija, Uhuru newspaper, who is surprisingly focusing on Wangari Maathai’s separation from her husband in the 1970’s.

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