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The purpose of this study is to investigate on themes covered by media and factors affecting coverage of climate change information in Tanzania.

In all, 85 journalists from five local media were identified using snowballing and purposive methods where quantitative methods were applied.

The results show nearly a half (49 per cent) of the journalists yet to receive training on climate change, with the majority (77 per cent) of organisations providing such training being non-local. The majority (79.8 per cent) of media houses lack editorial policies. Findings show journalists mostly cover information on climate impact and adaptation (49.3 per cent) followed by weather and climate trends (33.8 per cent), while the least covered topics are on renewable energy and climate and poverty (1.4 per cent).

The results imply journalists lack training on climate change. This may result into low and poor quality coverage of climate change information and inadequate public awareness and understanding. The study concludes that challenges in verifying information from a source, media lack of editorial policy and little exposure and access to specific internet climate change information sources may affect public agenda setting, coverage and adaptation to climate change. It is suggested that a policy be established to foster on access to climate information through frequent short training which expose journalists to new knowledge and networking.

This study contributes to literature and knowledge on climate themes reported in developing countries and factors influencing coverage of climate change.

In the current post-human society, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms are rapidly being deployed in newsrooms around the world to enhance processes of news idea conception, newsgathering, writing, packaging and dissemination. Although AI adaptation has been ongoing especially in Western Newsrooms over the last decade, this process is only budding in sub-Saharan newsroom contexts. This study explores perceptions, use, prospects and challenges in the adaptation of AI and algorithms in newsrooms. This qualitative survey draws insights from 33 respondents from newspapers, radio stations, online media and community media in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia. The study found varied levels of AI adoption in several newsrooms with some newsrooms not yet using AI while others were fully experimenting with a variety of tools, functionalities – even producing their own AI tools and also in change employment patterns to accommodate the skills needed within this new field. In some of the ‘inactive AI newsrooms’ individual journalists took the onus on themselves to learn and use the disruptive technologies and while the general attitudes towards AI were positive among journalists, the attitudes among management was generally considered poor. The study concludes for the benefits to be maximally leveraged, several of the bottlenecks in application must be addressed. These include the integration of ‘humans-in the loop’, journalistic principles, decolonial and local contextual perspectives in AI development and use. Such perspectives and synergies would need to be drawn from media ecosystems – including journalism education, research, policy, industry and developers.

The world is experiencing democratic backsliding such that the situation is down back to 1986. This has resulted in the global shrinking of civic space for civil society organizations (CSOs). NGOs engaging in advocacy activities are seen to be among the CSOs affected. Using four NGOs cases from Tanzania, the study contributes to the civic space debate by uncovering how advocacy NGOs become resilient.

The study is anchored in interpretivism and a cross-sectional case study design, following a qualitative approach path. Data were collected through interviews and a documentary review.

Results show that several strategies such as complying, building community back-up, collaboration, strategic litigation, using digital media and changing the scope are applied. However, strategies face obstacles including scope limitations, expected democratic roles, high cost, changes in the scope and being outsmarted by the government, and hence their effectiveness is questionable.

This study focused on advocacy NGOs. More studies can be conducted for other advocacy-related CSOs on how they become resilient.

While NGOs are allowed to exist in the country, their freedom continue to be curtailed. Even the effectiveness of resiliency becomes temporary and depends on the political will of the existing regime.

Tanzania NGOs have to build strong bonds with citizens, expand the scope of strategies and use deliberative democratic principles to educate the government to change laws and tolerate plural political culture. Also, NGOs in other countries with confined civic space can apply the same.

Despite the potential benefits of open government data (OGD) and its recent adoption by many governments, little is known about monitoring its use by the public. This paper aims to address the knowledge gap by empirically examining OGD usage in Tanzania.

A field survey design was used to gather quantitative data from 288 people in seven regions of Tanzania to facilitate an analysis of the determinants of users’ behavioural intention and use behaviour of OGD. Guided by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model, the study analysed the tendencies of these determinants on the use of the OGD portal.

The results show that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions affect users’ acceptance and use of the OGD portal. The results suggest that OGD initiatives should focus more on their potential applications than publication. It is important to monitor and evaluate OGD use and the conditions that allow it to continue. By linking OGD with other government initiatives, governments can build strategies, capacity and social awareness. During the development of OGD platforms for extensive reuse, new data technologies like the semantic web should be considered.

Hitherto, research has underlined the significance of OGD initiatives at large and that studies in developing countries are scarce, especially that probe the uptake of the current efforts. The present study seeks to plug this research gap by examining the use of OGD in Tanzania’s context.

This study aims to assess barriers in accessing and uptaking climate change adaptation information among smallholder tomato farmers in Tanzania.

This study was conducted in Iringa and Morogoro regions, Tanzania. It adopted cross-sectional research design. Multistage, purposive and random sampling techniques with a sample size of 183 smallholder tomato farmers were used. Questionnaires containing closed- and open-ended questions, interview guide and focus group discussions were used to collect data. To ensure validity and reliability of data collection instruments, pretesting of the questionnaires was conducted by administering them to a small group of smallholder tomato growers. Statistical Product and Service Solutions software was used to analyse quantitative data while NVivo was used for analysing qualitative data.

Lack of clear understanding of climate change information (132, 72.1%), scarcity of libraries and information centres (125, 68.3%), inadequate income (125, 68.3%), lack of trust of sources of information (114, 62.3%), lack of sufficient knowledge about climate change (111, 60%), illiteracy (110, 60.1%), poor distribution of electricity in rural areas (109, 59.6%) and use of jargons (93, 50.8%) in explaining climate change adaptation issues are hindrances for smallholder tomato farmers to access and uptake climate change adaptation information.

This study was conducted in only two districts in Tanzania; thus, the findings cannot be generalized.

The government and relevant agencies are recommended to use appropriate strategies for breaking the barriers that impede easy access and uptake of climate change adaptation information by smallholder tomato farmers as one of the interventions to combat the impacts posed by climate change.

This study has contributed to the ongoing discourses on climate change issues. Such discourses have influenced attention and understanding of the role of access and uptake of climate change adaptation information by smallholder farmers for planning and implementation of adaptation strategies through awareness creation.

This study is in line with goal number 13.3 of Sustainable Development Goals, which vows on taking necessary actions in combating climate change and its impacts. Thus, smallholder tomato farmers’ awareness about climate change through access and uptake of climate change adaptation information is one of the interventions to combat climate change and its impacts.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2019.

The paper provides a brief description of all 370 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested as a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This chapter explores how feminist and women-owned media/organisations in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania navigated the impact of COVID-19. Three debilitating realities contextualise this study. The first is the fact that feminist media find themselves trapped in a global existential struggle following the steady collapse of traditional media’s economic models. Second, women’s owned media by their nature are marginal and undermined by hegemonic patriarchal power structures and third, COVID-19 spared no media. The pandemic devastated the media industry globally especially print, and community-owned media such as women’s owned media. The chapter is informed by political economy of feminist media theories with a main focus on principles of media viability. It draws from interviews with managers and senior reporters at leading feminist and women-owned media/organisations in the three countries. The findings shed light on how operations, human resources, content and financial sustainability were navigated and reshaped in a flawed health, political and socio-cultural systemic context that threatened to annihilate the case media. We highlighted the innovative solutions and resolve indicative of the resilience, determination and agency that these women-owned media/organisations exercised in the face of the crisis at the time, something others can learn from.

The purpose of this paper is to review the attempts to describe the features and characteristics of business associations in Tanzania which are aiming to influence public policy. It concludes that those attempts, whilst thought provoking, do not go far enough to be of real use to practitioners and offers an improved model.

This paper uses empirical evidence, gathered from interviews with business associations, supplemented by reviewing their research reports and policy position papers and cross referenced through interviews with public officials.

Activities and approaches of successful business associations are described and used to draw out characteristics which might enable associations to be categorised in one of four development stages based on their approach to influencing public policy.

The new model is conceptual and work is now required to assess its validity.

Donors, in their design of advocacy support programmes, already focus support on associations in one or two stages of development. An improved model will make it easier for them, and practitioners, to categorise business associations. Importantly, it will provide indicators for how business associations are expected to improve as a result of the support that they are offered and thus to assess the success of the support programme.

There has been little research and little discussion about the features and characteristics of business associations that might lead to success in influencing public policy and thus in improving the enabling environment. This paper contributes to filling that gap.

This study was conducted to analyse the extent at which Tanzanian newspapers paid attention to climate change information over the period of 10 years between January 2006 and December 2015.

Six Tanzanian newspapers were quantitatively content analysed for frequencies of coverage to climate change information.

The results indicate that of total six Tanzanian newspapers had very few (684; 0.84 per cent) articles on climate change which is an average of 68.4 articles per year. Much attention was given to entertainment (24,331; 30 per cent) followed by miscellaneous (19,413; 24.0 per cent) and advertisements (18,112; 22.3 per cent). The Pearson’s chi-square test indicates that there was a significant difference in χ² = 21,765, p-value < 2.2e −16 between the level of coverage of climate change articles on other topics in the selected newspapers.

Scanning the sampled six newspapers for climate change information and recording the results in the code sheet for the period of 10 years was a tedious and time-consuming exercise which demanded researchers and coders to be extremely careful. Also it is possible that the sampling strategy used led to missing some data that would have resulted into different conclusions about each newspaper’s coverage on climate change. However, the systematic sampling strategy was applied for a long period, that is, 40 months for each newspaper that increased the reliability and accuracy of the results and conclusions about the overall trends in each newspaper’s coverage of climate change information.

These findings imply that, as the disseminators of information, Tanzanian newspapers did not pay adequate attention to climate change issues. The study concludes that contrary to the fact that climate change is among the threatening phenomena in Tanzania that would commensurate a significant attention in the media, the findings of this study indicate that the volume of coverage devoted to climate change by the newspapers in Tanzania is very low and disproportionate to the level of threat. This leaves a question on the Tanzanian newspapers’ dedication to reporting climate change information. It is therefore recommended that newspapers’ media owners, editors and journalists should be environmental nationalistic enough to frequently report climate change information, and the scope of the government-owned newspapers should be revisited to ensure more coverage of climate change information in their publication which can be done by having a section specifically dedicated for climate change issue.

This study has therefore contributed to the growing body of analytical research knowledge on the role of newspapers in the dissemination of climate change information in Tanzania. This study has also highlighted the importance of taking into account newspapers coverage of climate change information which can further be used for policy recommendations to improve the climate change information communication system through the use of newspapers and show the credibility of the newspapers in creating awareness of climate change in Tanzania.

This chapter examines strategies deployed at individual and institutional levels to combat fake news in two media houses in Uganda. Grounded in the hierarchy of influences model, we examine journalists' and editors' perspectives on how Vision Group and Nation Media Group newsrooms respond to fake news. Journalists' and editors' responses, obtained through semi-structured interviews as well as document review enabled us to underscore the centrality of professional standards, training and technology in combating fake news. We found that technology plays a key role in fact-checking, although newsrooms are yet to adopt advanced digital tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms. The newsrooms under investigation deploy conventional hardware and software to detect, flag and debunk fake news. We posit that for the strategies adopted at the organisational level to succeed, they ought to appeal to individual reporters' goals and interests. Further, discourses on adoption of newer technology ought to reflect the contexts in which the news organisations operate in addition to their financial standing.