Human rights and mobile reporting: Creating a global awareness of child rights

While they hardly make it into traditional mainstream media, they are now flooding into cyberspace and the blogosphere thanks to the Web and mobile phone technologies. The power of the mobile phone in the context of community reporting resides in its simplicity, both through the ordinary tools used by reporters – the phones which almost everyone knows or owns by now – and through the reporters themselves, who are members of the community being reported about. Human rights are part of communities’ everyday life and are thus one of the most recurrent topics of community mobile reporting. In this workshop, Voices of Africa Media Foundation wants to focus on one specific topic, namely child rights and child abuse, as viewed and captured by mobile reporters in Tanzania, Kenya and Ghana. These reports show that mobile phones can serve as tools for child rights monitoring –and thus as human rights monitoring – when placed in the hands of trained community members.