The project, Communication frontliners for the Tanzanian community has had its share of contributions to the fight against the growing burden of antimicrobial resistance in Tanzania. The project’s purpose is to inform, capacitate, and empower the Tanzanian journalist’s community to communicate about the fight against antimicrobial resistance to the rest of the Tanzanian community.

With purpose it looks to contribute to solutions around two challenges facing the community of journalist in the country. These being.

1. The unavailability of contextual information on AMR and its reporting strategies and
2. The unavailability of collaborative story ideation platforms for AMR based story generation among students of journalism and practicing journalists.

The Afyatoon team has carried out three sessions with practicing journalists since early June. The attendee included journalists from 20 regions across the country representing radio stations, that contributed to 45% of all attendees among other media outlets like Television stations, Newspaper and digital media.

Of the 20 regions, Morogoro region contributed the most attendees, 15%. Female journalists, again have had a larger share of all attendees in the different three session, contributing 53% of all participants.

These last three sessions were facilitated by esteemed health experts with a strong academic and practical background of Antimicrobial resistance and community based intervention. These were; Pharm. Josephat Hema, Pharm. Kelvin Msuya and Pharm Goodluck Nyondo.

Inclusive of the other two sessions that were done in May 2024, the afyatoon team has linked113 unique journalists across 25 regions from Tanzanian Mainland and Zanzibar with health experts and helped them to come up with more than 250 Antimicrobial resistance stories around Raising awareness among the rest of the Tanzanian community, successful stories of interventions and institutions working on AMR, and accountability of the regulatory authorities and the government. These ideas have been developed under the five collaborative story ideation sessions.

The team is currently building an interactive collaborative platform to link students of journalism, journalists and health experts to continue ensuring the easy availability of AMR based and health story collaborators and fast track this collaboration process towards generating of AMR based stories and their subsequent publication and showcasing to the rest of the Tanzanian community.