The African Editors Forum (TAEF) has challenged itself on its usefulness with regard to telling the African story as opposed to relying on international media with a set agenda.

This came up as media managers and editors convened yesterday in a sideline event of the ongoing African Union Summit taking place in Kigali.

Members expressed concerns on biased stories that are published by western media.

At the opening, participants discussed how to make the forum more relevant and sustainable, among other things.

Created in 2003, the forum is composed of more than 200 journalists in broadcast, print and social media.

Emrakeb Asefa, the Secretary General of the forum, said the meeting was expected to make a number of key resolutions on TAEF’s financial sustainability and how to tell the genuine African story.

"One of the strategies we have been observing turns around working with AU more executively and on a sustainability level, but the challenges are still very much alive. We hope by the closure of this summit, we should have generated concrete resolutions on how to attain our objectives,” she said.

"But I have to say it’s a challenge, because it’s a forum which is more or less a loose alliance where editors come and share common concerns; a forum where people share story ideas in an effort  to put African stories up there. But the big part of the solutions should emerge within,” she said.

Emrakeb further stated that a number of project proposals, specifically on media leadership programmes, were on the table, where practitioners can be trained in the coverage of alarming issues across the continent, for them to tell African human interest stories but it needed sustainable financing.

"It’s all about quality journalism and one way of doing that is to have constant funds, because so far, the current members have not been contributing as expected and this has been keeping the forum aground,” she added.

This, according to Kennedy Ndahiro, the representative of Rwanda’s Editor’s Forum (REFO), should help in the realisation of the "Africa we want, not the Africa they want” mantra around editors and other journalists.

The forum session, which is slated to wind up on Friday, attracted a number of renowned African journalists who will at the same time be on several panels that will see African Union commissioners shed light on the Agenda 2063.

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