Friday 17 June 2011

Jamilah Tangaza - Fellow, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford


Position: Head, Hausa Service, BBC World Service
Date of Fellowship: Trinity Term
Sponsor: BBC World Service

Jamilah Tangaza is the Head of BBC’s Hausa Service – one of the language services of the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC World Service. As Head of BBC Hausa, Jamilah Tangaza oversees the production and transmission of the Service’s daily output on radio, online and mobile phone. She runs two production teams – in London and in Nigeria; and manages BBC Hausa Staff which include Producers, Broadcast Journalists and In-the-field Reporters in Nigeria, Niger, Ghana and Cameroun.

Prior to becoming the Head of BBC Hausa, Jamilah worked as Acting Head of BBC Hausa between 2005 and 2006. She joined the BBC in 1992 as a Producer - planning, producing, and presenting news and current affairs programmes for the BBC Hausa Service. In 1994 she became a Senior Producer, overseeing production and supervising BBC Hausa staff and reporters in the West Africa region. From 2004 to 2005, Jamilah worked as the BBC’s Abuja Editor, responsible for planning and organising the BBC’s output from Nigeria.

Jamilah has also worked with various other BBC departments, presenting and producing a range of programmes including BBC World Service’s English flagship programme, Outlook, and the BBC’s English for Africa programmes, Focus on Africa and Network Africa.

Jamilah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Bayero University Kano, Nigeria, and a Master of Science degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She attended the BBC’s Leadership Programme in collaboration with the Ashridge Business School, University of Hertfordshire. Jamilah was an attendee of the British Parliamentary Briefing in 2010, where she spoke on Radicalisation in Northern Nigeria exploring the nature and causes of radicalisation in Nigeria and how perceptions of these local conflicts influence the nature of radicalisation including that of the middle class in the United Kingdom.

Jamilah is a member of the United Kingdom’s Chattered Institute of Management. She is also the founder of Community Skills and Acquisition Initiative (COSAI) - a non-profit voluntary organization in Nigeria which mainly seeks to provide access to vital information particularly to low-income and rural communities in Nigeria.

Research Project:
In 2009 Jamilah Tangaza conceived the BBC Hausa Village road show (BBC Hausa A Karkara). The Village road show turned out to be the most ambitious in-the-field reporting the BBC Hausa Service had ever embarked on in its more than 50 years’ history. Almost twenty (20) journalists and production personnel travelled to twenty-two (22) villages in Northern Nigeria with the aim of engaging rural communities as well as giving them an opportunity to be part of a thriving and debating global media environment that’s changing rapidly in today’s digital technology world.

Whilst on that journey BBC Hausa offered a total of 1600 minutes of content via Radio and Online. We unexpectedly discovered too, that despite their low-literacy and low income levels some rural dwellers used mobile phones to access, store and share news and information on the BBC Hausa Village Road show.

This aspect of the findings, experience and implications of BBC Hausa A Karkara form the basis for my fellowship research at the Reuters Institute. The title of the research paper is “Challenges and Obstacles of Creating Mobile Content for Illiterate Audiences in Rural Africa: A Case Study of BBC Hausa Village Road Show”.

Internet picks
www.bbchausa.com
This is my “home” site in every sense of the word. It is my one stop shop for news in Hausa vernacular about Nigeria, Africa and the World! BBC Hausa is a rich, multimedia site and serves as a great resource for research and general information.

www2.lse.ac.uk@lse/POLIS
Some great papers here, with fascinating insights (both for practitioners and academics) in today’s rapidly changing, technology -driven media world.

www.google.com
Brilliant search tool which I have consistently used since the first days I stumbled into it!