The 8th of May 2024 was again an impact documenting day for the Afyatoon team as far as the fight against antimicrobial resistance is concerned, and a day of awakening to a new set of Journalists practicing across different parts of the country from different digital and legacy media platforms ranging from Television, radios and newspapers with both local and country-wide penetration during the 2nd day of our antimicrobial resistance training for communication front-liners.

The session was again moderated by Jofrey Amos and facilitated by Pharm John method and Pharm Kulwa Dotto Domitila (MPH) who specifically presented on introduction to antimicrobial resistance and the one-health approach to antimicrobial resistance respectively after the afyatoon team had showcased respective animation on the same topics.

The training session embarked on building understanding about antimicrobial resistance and highlighting on best practices towards reporting about antimicrobial resistance, involving 47 new unique journalists as its audience.

This specific knowledge sharing session was followed by a well-structured collaborative story ideation session which was blessed by an introductory remark the Tanzania media foundation with characteristic structure of a good story idea, which includes defining and answering the following,

1. Title (in capital letters with independent and depent variables identified)
2. What is the desired condition or state (ideal)?
3. What is the current reality/state/situation?
4. To what extent does the current situation differ from the desired condition?
5. What are the (negative) effects (potential or actual) on human life resulting from the difference?
6. What is the relevance and uniqueness of the story?
7. Who are the victims (right bearers) in the story?
8. Who are accountable (duty holders) in the story?

This remark was blessed by reciprocal efforts from all the journalists in the training that filled in the story bank form of ideas on different aspects of antimicrobial resistance, identifying areas where they will require medical review assistance and visual aid support from the afyatoon medical and production team respectively.

These two sessions (7th and 8th May 2024) were successful at reaching out to a total of 115 practicing journalists from different parts of the country. Majority of the Journalists; 52% represented Radio stations across 22 regions in the country. The remaining attendees constituted of representatives from Newspapers, making 23%, Digital media houses, 18% and Television stations contributing 5% to the total number of attendees.

The journalist developed a toral of 98 story ideas in these two sessions, surpassing our minimum target of 70 story ideas in 3 months withing two consecutive sessions. The afyatoon team will be working with journalists to actualize these story ideas into sharable products for the Tanzanian community.

More sessions are coming in this and next coming month, with our next topic focusing on the mechanism of antimicrobial resistance development.