Africa Media Festival 2024: What’s Next in Media?
Baraza Media Lab is thrilled to announce the second annual Africa Media Festival, set to take place from February 21st to 22nd, 2024, at the Nairobi National Museum, Kenya.
After a successful inaugural event in 2023, which brought together over 650 participants from 18 African countries and beyond, the festival is poised to once again provide a dynamic platform for thought leaders, creatives, and innovators to converge, engage, and shape the future of African media.
The 2023 edition of the Africa Media Festival provided a vital forum for African media stakeholders to reflect on the challenges and celebrate the successes within the industry.
Among the significant topics addressed were the use of the African media space as a testing ground for disruptive technologies, the need for proactive policy frameworks, and the call for a shift in the perception of “African media.” Acknowledging the incredible diversity across the continent, the festival emphasised the importance of crafting unique business models, policies, and funding strategies and nurturing diverse talent.
The 2024 Africa Media Festival builds on these discussions with the following objectives:
● Celebrating Cutting-Edge Innovations: The festival aims to celebrate the latest innovations in the media sector, inspiring experimentation and pushing boundaries.
● Enhancing Knowledge Sharing: Participants will engage in discussions about emerging trends, evidence-based practices, and novel approaches to promoting media independence and sustainability in Africa.
● Sparking Cross-Disciplinary Conversations: The festival will promote collaboration, trust-building, and collective action across various sectors to drive regional media excellence.
The conference invites diverse stakeholders, including investors, grantmakers, media owners, civil society representatives, social media influencers, journalists, creatives, and government officials. With a target of 600 delegates over two days, the festival aims to attract insightful speakers from both within and outside the continent. Expected participants include writers, journalists, cartoonists, AI technologists, TV and radio professionals, social media influencers, photographers, funders, and poets.
Why Attend?
The Africa Media Festival is a unique continental platform that offers attendees the opportunity to:
● Network with key industry players, policy leaders, transformative governments, and media tech industry experts.
● Engage with emerging technologies in the media sector through hackathons.
● Witness the birth of innovative media-tech ideas.
● Collaborate and participate in pre-and post-conference meetups organized in coordination with various organisations.
“We want this year’s Festival to be a space that will surface future trends, an opportunity to gaze at the horizon of the big trends that are shaping the media ecosystem,” says Christine Mungai, Lead Curator at Baraza Media Lab and the Festival Curator of this year’s event. “Join us in this thoughtful exploration of innovation in the present and insight into the future.”
Our Approach to the Festival
The festival has been meticulously crafted with official programming scheduled throughout the day, complemented by networking sessions in the early morning and evening. These community-organized sessions are designed to enhance the overall conference experience. The event will showcase a diverse array of formats, including panels, workshops, masterclasses, keynotes, research reports, product launches, networking opportunities, roundtable discussions, design thinking workshops, fireside chats, and artistic performances.
Notably, the program for the 2024 edition will diverge significantly from the 2023 edition. We are introducing more intimate and collaborative activities, reducing the number of panel discussions. For a glimpse of the day’s activities, we encourage you to visit the Africa Media Festival website’s “2024 Schedule” page. This shift in format is a deliberate effort to create a more engaging and interactive environment for participants.
The Theme
The central theme for Africa Media Festival 2024 is “What’s Next in Media.” This theme encourages participants to dream and lay the groundwork for groundbreaking innovations that will transform the African media landscape and rekindle hope in an industry facing challenges.
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