African media bosses will this year gather for the annual African Media Leadership Conference (AMLC) in Accra, Ghana from 4 – 7 October to examine how they can harness and “monetise” the continent’s growing youthful audiences who are heavily reliant on digital media channels as their sources of news, information and entertainment.

Co-hosted by Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatjie Institute for Media Leadership (SPI) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) foundation, the conference focuses on building networks among media leaders in Africa and aspires to become a truly pan-African body which seeks to address the myriad of challenges that impact on Africa’s media. Previous conferences have been held in diverse African countries, including Uganda, Mauritius, Mozambique, Kenya and South Africa.

Established in 2002, the SPI offers professional media management and leadership training programmes, including the honours degree-level Posgraduate Diploma in Media Management to aspirant and practising media leaders.

Led by media industry experts and academics, the programmes combine theory and practice to teach participants how to lead sustainable media organisations in rapidly changing conditions typified by Africa’s socio-economic and political landscape. In addition the SPI also offers short-term professional courses as well as customised courses for media companies.

KAS has been engaged with Africa for over 40 years and has offices in over 100 countries around the world. The foundation works to strengthen democracy, build good political governance and buttress a free and independent news media in Africa.

In 2002, the KAS regional media programme for sub-Saharan Africa, based in Johannesburg, was launched to build and strengthen a free and independent media in the region. Offering a variety of courses, training workshops and conferences, the programme has focused on media law, investigative journalism and media management.

Running under the theme “Learning from the Future” Africa’s Media Map in 2029”, this year's AMLC will have 65 delegates from all African regions, including the Maghreb Arab region. Given the inclusion of this new region, the number has grown to almost double that of last year's delegates. The conference now includes media leaders from Southern, Eastern, Western, Central and the Horn of Africa, as well as those in the Indian Ocean archipelagos

“This is a natural sequel to our conference last year when we broadly examined how African media was embracing New Media platforms as a source of additional audience reach and revenue,” says Francis Mdlongwa, Director of the SPI.

“This year’s AMLC will therefore look critically at what African media firms are already doing in tapping the youth market, the so-called digital natives; what they could learn from media in other parts of the world and what they themselves could do in experimenting and innovating in this crucial present and future market,” he says.

Frank Windeck, head of the KAS Sub-Saharan Africa Media Programme, which funds the AMLC, said: “When we started the conference, the traditional media dominated the field of participants. This is rapidly changing. Internet entrepreneurs, bloggers and other creatives from the new media are coming on board more and more. This reflects the 21st century's media reality which is dramatically shaped by new ways of communication. To prepare the African media for the future, we need to create more networks between the traditional and the modern, which we strive to provoke through the conference”.

From South Africa, media experts such as Ray Hartley, founding editor of The Times; Chantell Ilbury, one of South Africa's leading scenario strategists and co-author of best-selling book The Mind of a Fox - Scenario Planning in Action, and Khaya Dlanga, award-winning blogger among other well respected media practitioners will participate in the conference.

The AMLC series was launched by the SPI and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) in 2002. The conferences have become an annual high-level platform for strategy formulation, networking and sharing of ideas and experiences by African media chief executive officers and editors-in-chief of print, broadcast, online and converged media.

Mdlongwa said: “This year we plan to become a truly pan-African body when we complete our expansion programme and bring in the Maghreb Arab region’s representatives to the conference for the very first time. We started small, focusing on Southern Africa, but we have been gradually expanding our footprint to include East Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Africa and West Africa.

“In a world in which social capital and networks are playing an ever more critical role in defining the success of any business, we at the SPI are very grateful to the KAS for its solid financial and logistical support without which this important network would not have been possible,” he added.

Learn more about the Sol Plaatjie Institute For Media Leadership here