Thursday, February 2, 2012

What did the prime minister say last Sunday?

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 of a company or an organization are usually found on the top of their 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 Namibia. 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 assignment 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 (19.8 percent!) and what prime minister Mizengo Pinda actually said last Sunday to the doctors who are on strike, seemed to be a bit more 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 results only from Tanzanian or Kiswahili language websites.

Now the participants are searching for 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, Angolan Miss Universe crowned last year. Postings of the stories will be made later this afternoon.

Today we also had a special session on plagiarism, and we also went through a large number of international news sites and other web resources providing useful information on African events and backgrounds, both political, social and cultural. I will provide links soon.

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