Against a backdrop of growing unemployment, hunger, and violence, the South African communication landscape is shaped by our unjust history and world beating inequality. A handful of corporations control the dominant media and seek maximum profit at the expense of the marginalised majority.
Yetu will develop websites, databases, & mobile apps designed to serve the information and expression needs of the marginalised majority and centre progressive voices.
Our fist project is a ‘landing page from below’ (see concept note). This will be a web portal to aggregate the content produced by progressive media projects and organisations and build a demand-side economy of scale for human rights and social justice information content. The project objectives are:
- Deliver progressive content to a massive audience of the marginalised majority living in townships, informal settlements and rural areas across South Africa
- Promote rights ordinated and transformative content and services contributing to the impact of by progressive civil society and journalism organisations.
- Resource & promote active citizenship.
- Contributing to the development of a peoples internet, decommodified and free from commercial and state surveillance and censorship.
- Becoming self sustainable by selling advertising to value aligned organisations.
The portal’s content will include news & opinion as well as links to a variety of educational resources, the weather forecast, maps, and a searchable database of contacts for government and civil society bodies that offer the public reporting, advice, counselling etc.
The project is proposed as a partnership between the Peoples Media Consortium with the Yetu’s Infotech Collective and South Africa’s progressive media producers.