Editors from 14 African nations to create regional forum

In Zambia and Botswana, editors have already gathered in the past two weeks to discuss the important editorial issues of their countries and to choose their four representatives to send to the meeting on November 29 and 30. They have sent their delegate lists and minutes of their meetings to the secretariat of The Africa Editors' Forum (TAEF).

This is one of the five meetings planned for the regions of Africa in the lead up to the proposed launch of The Africa Editors' Forum (TAEF) in April next year.

The TAEF chairperson and Southern representative on the TAEF interim steering committee, Mathatha Tsedu, has communicated with all the editors on the TAEF email list, asking them to contact other editors and urgently convene editors' meetings in each country.

"It is a requirement that delegates be editors and be representatives of their country's editors - they cannot come to such a meeting to speak as individuals," he said this week.

"It is now urgent that other countries in the region meet, as the time for organising this is running short."

The names of the 4 delegates and the minutes of the editors' meeting from each country should be sent to the TAEF secretariat (email: ).

Original communique

Senior editors from 14 southern African countries will meet in Johannesburg, South Africa, next month to establish the first of five planned regional chapters for the new Africa Editors' Forum (TAEF).

The meeting, scheduled for November 29 and 30, plans to create communication networks and coordination structures between existing editors' forums in member countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Similar meetings will be held in Central, East, North and West Africa in February.

The southern African meeting will also encourage countries without functional editors' associations to create national bodies. Such new organizations would be patterned after role models in Swaziland and South Africa, where the SA National Editors' Forum (SANEF) is the country's most influential professional media association.

Similar bodies are being created in Botswana, Malawi and Zambia, according to TAEF, but the rest of SADC's 14-member states lack unifying umbrella bodies.

Each SADC country will send four delegates to the Johannesburg meeting to develop common strategies, policies, and governance frameworks, and to debate TAEF's draft pan-African constitution and program of action.

TAEF was established at a pan-African editors' meeting in South Africa earlier this year and will be formally launched at a continental "Reporting Africa" conference planned in April 2004 for Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

TAEF, the first truly pan-African editors' forum, intends to develop a uniform code of professional ethics, minimum training standards, minimum reporting standards. The forum also plans to campaign for the safety of journalists, and against restrictions on media.

Interim TAEF chairman Mathatha Tsedu, a prominent South African editor, will chair the Johannesburg meeting.

To participate in the initiative, contact TAEF's secretariat as soon as possible to ensure that visa and travel arrangements are quickly made. Further information available from Elizabeth Barratt at e-mail . SANEF's website is www.sanef.co.za.