A CD-ROM on malaria prevention has won the first prize for production of digital content awarded by a national jury under the auspices of the Ministry of Science and Technology in Mozambique.
Developed by the Manhiça Community Multimedia Centre(CMC), the CD-ROM will now compete for Mozambique in the international E-content Award to be announced during the WSIS in Tunis in November.
The CD-ROM, Malária pela e para a comunidade de Manhiça was produced last year as part of an ICT learning initiative. It was made by the CMC in both Portuguese and local languages (Shangana and Macua), in collaboration with the community of Manhiça and the Centre of Informatics at the University of Eduardo Modlane (CIUEM) in Maputo. It has since been widely circulated to other CMCs and community information centres in Mozambique.
The CD-ROM Malária provides the communities of Mozambique with very useful audio-visual information; it is of high professional quality, comprehensive and detailed, tailored to the needs of the user group. This CD-ROM is a great tool in the fight against malaria, raising awareness on how to prevent and treat the disease, was the commentary of the jury.
The jury further acknowledged the CD-ROM for providing the communities with locally generated content in local languages, reaching out with the messages about malaria without being too scientific and distant to the users.
The Minister of Science and Technology Venancio Massingue said that he was happy to see this kind of local content creation, hoping this will be a starting point and an inspiration to others in producing more digital content of this kind. The CMC is not only providing access to digital information, but is also able to disseminate the information and reach out to more people through radio broadcasting, he noted.
The CD-ROM on malaria is the first multimedia digital production in national languages produced at the community level. The project is emphasising the need to generate more local content in local languages and in participatory ways.
"The key to success of the CMCs is not just to provide the communities with technical equipment. Even more important is the generation of useful content information of importance to the community in languages they understand disseminated through different means of communication digital, radio, video, posters, flyers, newsletters etc, says Polly Gaster, the coordinator of the CMC Scale Up Project in Mozambique.
Source< link http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=19712&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html UNESCO>
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