Values & Components
The Minority Africa Fellowship is founded on set values and principles that inform the program design
The Fellowship Mission
We believe in media representation and its potential to have real world impact. This conviction feeds our corresponding aspiration to achieve an African media landscape in which minorities are represented. We’re building a diverse and inclusive African media primarily through engaging marginalized communities to spearhead their media coverage.
Components
The fellowship components comprise set elements we believe are necessary both for the achievement of an inclusive African media but also in the eventual goal which is an equitable and democratic African future in which social and policy systems interface to the benefit of minorities. We believe this future is possible and continually work towards it.
These components put communities at the center of interventions that involve them:
01. Inclusion
The realization of existing structures that prioritize keeping out groups considered dispensable, less desirable, and less moral, and a commitment to dismantling such barriers through actual practice.
02. Representation
An understanding of representation as inherently political and with a corresponding real world impact through it’s existence or lack thereof.
03. Democracy
Seen through equal participation, access, and expression of marginalized persons and communities.
04. Access
We believe that communities should be able to access news content about themselves not hidden behind paywalls or generally exclusionary language and framing.
05. Community
An awareness of the necessity of community, how media can form and sustain communities for marginalized groups and the place of unity in designing inclusive African futures.
06. Innovation
Existing systems will not necessarily aid their dismantling. We believe in the need for disruption and to innovate around structures that pride themselves in exclusion.