Femina HIP - my organisation

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Okay, I’m cheating a little bit here, as I’m typing this up with a ‘slight’ delay, but at least now I know the organisation and can explain everything a bit better…
Femina HIP is multimedia initiative, which started off 10 years ago with a magazine, called ‘Femina’. Originally a commercial glossy women’s magazine, it was repositioned as a vehicle to educate young Tanzanians about sexual reproductive health and many other aspects of life. It is now the biggest magazine in the country and distributed in some 160,000 copies all across Tanzania to over 1600 secondary schools, NGOs and a small number is sold at newsstands. Due to some legal issues and the inclusion of men in the new target audience the name changed in the meantime to ‘Fema’ magazine. A few years later came a second magazine ‘SiMchezo’, which targets semi-literate youths (more pictures, less text), a Talk Show (more about this later) and an internet offering under www.chezasalama.com
Everything is done under the premise of edu-tainment, the concept of combining education with entertainment to make it more accessible for the audience (and after working for 5 years at Discovery Networks not something completely new to me).
There are about 30 staff, mainly young, female and Tanzanian (apart from the latter not much different to the media companies I worked for in Europe). It’s been headed up by a Norwegian woman, who founded the organisation and who still calls the shots on most issues.

The office
Femina is based in downtown Dar Es Salaam on the top floor of an ugly 1980s six story block. Unlike back home in London I take the lift (whenever it is working…), as the staircase isn’t air-conditioned and it’s just so unbearably hot here.
The office is air-conditioned and many Tanzanians seem to favour setting it on 17°C, not just at Femina, but in many other places too! It’s not that different to an office in Europe apart from the occasional power cut (there is a back-up generator that covers sometimes), painfully slow internet (getting slower the later in the day it is), virtually no office equipment (one pen per person, one malfunctioning stapler per half office), half the staff not in the office despite a signing-in book, desk phones (but you have to ask the receptionist to call for you) and a few other strange little things. But this is one of the best functioning and most Westernised local organisations in the country.

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Photos

Fema Users Guide
One of the Femina publications, a booklet to instruct teachers how they can utilise Fema Magazine in various lessons