Our partners, Tanda.net in Kenya and Redes AC in Mexico, have been actively engaging our regional communities of practice through virtual workshops and individual sessions.

Recently, Tanda.net led a comprehensive virtual workshop with community radio partners from various parts of Kenya. This session provided updates on the Colmena app’s development and onboarded the participants to the DW Akademie instance.

These workshops reflect our commitment to a user-first approach, ensuring that Colmena’s beneficiaries can interact with the tool throughout its iterative development. This approach allows us to incorporate our beneficiaries’ insights and suggestions at each stage, leading up to its final public release.

It was refreshing to see the excitement on the participants’ faces as they experienced the latest version of Colmena. Their enthusiasm stemmed not only from witnessing the app’s general improvement improvement but, more importantly, from seeing the incorporation of their feedback and suggestions.

The words from Robert Otiang’, a radio presenter from one of community radio partners in Kenya (Gulf Radio), puts this into perspective:

“The [DW Akademie] instance of Colmena is impressive… I’m happy to see that my feedback and suggestions on the Mobile Studio have been incorporated. Reflecting on our initial stages, [The Mobile Studio] has significantly evolved, and will surely revolutionize audio production processes for grassroots media organizations like as Gulf Radio.”