Tembea na Majira

This much loved, award-winning Kenyan radio soap opera ran twice weekly for more than 12 years until 2007. At its height Tembea Na Majira (“walk with the times” in Kiswahili) was followed by over 5 million Kenyan listeners and was sustained throughout by a successful collaboration between private and public partners – from the corporate and donor communities. For this successful collaboration Mediae was awarded the World Aware Award for Development.

Tembea Na Majira helped Mediae develop the successful edutainment model that today underpins most of its media projects. Tembea Na Majira followed the lives and livelihoods of a typical rural Kenyan community, tracing their loves and losses, their successes and failures. Through modeling the realities of African life and demonstrating best practices and wise decisions, Tembea Na Majira’s edutainment approach successfully empowered ordinary rural and peri-urban people with information and examples they might use to improve their own lives and circumstances. To maintain its popularity and impacts, the series was regularly and thoroughly researched to ensure it met the needs of audiences who valued the programme for the entertainment it provided – but also for the useful information that it contained.

Tembea Na Majira finally went off air when regular audiences dwindled to 1.5 million. The steady drop in audience numbers coincided with the liberalization of the FM airwaves in Kenya and the release of frequencies to independent community FM stations. Today more than 120 stations compete for the national radio audience. The immense growth in broadcasters has fragmented the radio audience across Eastern Africa, with local communities tuning to numerous small local stations in vernacular languages. This has greatly complicated the use of radio as a means to communicate with large audiences in the region. Mediae’s response to this challenge has been to develop new models of sharply targeted FM radio programming such as Ngima Ilawo.