Ever heard of health education from a journalist on radio, TV station or read it from a poster congested with words? And you did not feel part of the content; it’s not specific to you, not easy to understand and does not put you on edge. At afyatoon, we have a program that is working to change that.

Under this Program, we are looking to train journalism students and young journalists yearly on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), creative production of content in the field of AMR and effective ways to report it; empowering and building capacity to develop content to be showcased to the Tanzania population, creating a community with AMR literacy and capable to take actions to reducing the burden on AMR in Tanzania.

The Program is designed to have four phases of interlocking and parallel educational interventions aimed to synergically fight against the growing burden of antimicrobial resistance. These phases include an AMR master class to empower communication front liners, audiovisual storytelling design and creation as a supplemental behavioral changing tool, crossing the borders with the same initiatives but in different languages and localities and lastly the successful stories; narrating the program in numbers and quality.

In partnership with the Tanzania Media foundation (TMF), Afyatoon is implementing the first phase of the program focusing on an in-depth Antimicrobial resistance course for journalism students and junior professional journalists across the country. It is developing an engaging, captivating and practical masterclass with an in-depth systematic nurturing approach and AMR based content dissemination. This educational course will be produced in English and Swahili to foster inclusivity and scalability.

The program under its first phase looks to set the foundation for being the next best step to empowering and enabling Journalists; the AMR Communication front liners for the Tanzanian community by offering training in areas as basics about AMR, one health, development of AMR, health communication for behavioral change and role of communities and communication front liners in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, and highlighting on the different players against AMR.

The Learning materials will be in the form of videos integrated with 3D visual animations and illustration, to enhance understanding and intractability of the student and junior journalists with the learning content. Story and scripts for these videos are developed from exhaustive and in-depth articles on AMR written by renowned health specialists (Medical doctors and Pharmacists) in the Afyatoon team.

Delivery of the master class is going to be a hybrid one. Involving a virtual and physical presence.

Journalism students and Practicing journalists will be recruited into systematic campus hackathons and workshops respectively and coupled with specialists in the field of AMR and experienced authors and journalists in the field. These hackathons and workshops are designed to be the basis for practical AMR based story production, article generation, documentary ideation and formulation by journalism students and young practicing journalists respectively.

The afyatoon Animation studio (MEDTOON) will augment this production by creating visual arts ranging from stock illustrations to be used in news articles, simple character animations providing journalists with simplicity, captivating and entertaining aspects of what they will be producing for the Tanzanian community.

This activity aims at making journalism students and young journalists knowledgeable and competent to produce AMR based educational materials for the Tanzanian community independently.