The African Union Development Agency – NEPAD hosted on the 5th December 2022, African Union Media fellows in its Midrand, Johannesburg offices.

To ensure Africa is at the forefront of defining its own narrative and promoting the continents’ development framework Agenda 2063 to African and global audiences the African Union (AU) Information and Communication Directorate (ICD) launched the African Union Media Fellowship. The Fellowship is designed to provide a unique platform for African journalists and content producers to enhance their capacity to reframe the African narrative and promote developmental journalism using new and emerging technologies.

Following the open call for the Fellowship in April 2022, over 800 applications from across Africa and the diaspora.15 Fellows were selected as the first cohort of AU Media Fellows they were chosen based on criteria of innovation and ability of their pitches to challenge harmful stereotypical narratives and shape new and balanced discourse about the continent

Addressing the media fellows, the CEO of AUDA-NEPAD, Nardos Bekele-Thomas outlined the history of the Agency, from Secretariat to the Development Agency of the African Union .

She spoke on the responsibility of African citizens to realise the vision of Agenda 2063 and highlighted that the media in a development space should see themselves as agents of change by advocating on the mandate of AUDA-NEPAD, especially as tied to the Agenda 2063 vision and the Energize Africa initiative.

Energize Africa is an initiative of the AUDA-NEPAD. It is aimed at catalysing and harnessing youth’ creativity and innovativeness into Africa’s economic growth and development drive, whilst expanding income opportunities for the youth – through creation of jobs, innovation and entrepreneurship.

“The Agenda 2063 vision should be owned by every citizen of this continent. Every citizen of this continent must know about it and they must embrace it and fully understand what its about. The same applies to Energize Africa,” she said.

The Media fellows have over a week, visited AU Organs: AUDA-NEPAD, Pan African Parliament, the African Peer Review Mechanism and Africa Risk Capacity. They also visited South African National Broadcaster - SABC, Multichoice and Brand SA.

The African Union Development Agency-NEPAD will work closely with the AU Media fellows to ensure that citizens are updated on the work done by the Agency as its mandate is really about the realisation of the Agenda 2063 vision of the Africa We Want!

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