The South Africa Media Innovation Program (SAMIP)

In supporting media companies, non-profits, and start-ups, the SAMIP focuses on activities that include the following:

• Digital native products - Developing new approaches for collecting news and information, reporting, and distribution that embrace the possibilities of technology.
• New revenue opportunities - Pioneering new sources of revenue to help media companies achieve sustainability while remaining financially independent.
• Innovating in distribution - Supporting new models for distributing news that save costs, add value, or reach new audiences.
• Supporting underserved languages - Attempting to engage and distribute content to communities in vernacular languages that are under-served.
• Reaching rural communities - Testing innovative ways to reach and empower people outside of major urban areas, and those generally under-served by existing news media.
• Transitioning to digital - Finding and implementing solutions, products, or processes that assist legacy media to transform their businesses.

Through regular innovation challenges or calls for proposals, the programme identifies programmes and organisations to be supported with funding, technical support, and capacity building (often in the form of mentorships or the provision of additional staff). It assists organisations to either get their ideas off the ground or to expand what they have already developed. Since its inception, the programme has brought 24 media organisations into the programme in South Africa, including, for example:

• The Children’s Radio Foundation (CRF) - a youth-centred non-profit using radio to promote dialogue, leadership, and advocacy for young people across five African countries. Its first initiative within SAMIP was an award-winning toolkit to extend the reach and impact of their community radio partners through WhatsApp. CRF is now building The Radio Workshop, a social enterprise to develop podcasting in the region.
• The Daily Vox - a news site with an audience of 18-34 year olds that seeks to place citizens at the centre and to influence and impact the narrative of issues facing South Africa's youth.
• Explain.co.za - a news site that aims to explain the news to local audiences in fun and engaging ways. It offers a weekly news briefing by email and WhatsApp, and uses entertaining news videos to reach traditionally neglected audiences in South Africa.
• Food for Mzansi - a digital news start-up that covers the agriculture sector in South Africa with a focus on uncovering stories about people of colour in farming communities.
• Not Yet Uhuru - a digital activism eco-system that purports to be the voice of the womxn's liberation movement in South Africa. Not Yet Uhuru seeks to create a platform for engagement with and between womxn to challenge patriarchy and to build a feminist consciousness on the African continent.
• QuoteThisWoman+ - a non-profit start-up that is committed to getting more women’s voices heard in South African media across a wide range of subjects. They do this by maintaining and promoting a curated database of experts that can be accessed by interested parties.
• Media Hack Collective - a data journalism firm that has built a South-Africa-wide COVID-19 data portal as a data-viz start-up.
• Viewfinder - a South African investigative journalism start-up that applies investigative journalism, data visualisations, and video storytelling to expose abuses of power that impact on economically poor and marginalised communities. Viewfinder's focus within SAMIP is to build a sustainable revenue mix for its quality journalism and to develop new voices in its team in pursuit of a more just and inclusive South Africa.

Click here for the full list of current and past participants. With the first call for media innovators from Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to submit their proposals going out in July 2021, the projects and organisations supported by SAMIP are expected to expand in number and geographic reach.

In order to share their innovation experiences with other media organisations, SAIMP produces case studies and extracts key lessons learned from their work with partners.

Click here for more information on SAMIP.

Media Development

As of July 2021, SAMIP has:

• Provided over US$830,000 in grants;
• Delivered US$330,000+ in capacity building;
• Invested over US$1.24 million in programme participants who brought new products to market; and
• Seen its participants unlock over US$2.25 million in external revenue.