A slightly frazzled Ros Haden puts the final editing touches to FunDza’s 16th Rights story.
During 2014, we produced one new Rights story every month. Each of these stories had as a theme one of the rights enshrined in our Constitution. Together with the story we published resource materials – so that readers could develop a deeper understanding of our rights.
We believe that this is one of our most important projects. If we, as an organisation, desire to help develop educated, engaged and empowered young people in our country, then we need to provide them with the tools to make informed decisions, tools to understand their legal environment and tools to seek access to justice. While literacy in its basic form – the ability to read and write – is vital, so too is constitutional literacy.
As a result, we’ve been continuing our Rights project in our 2015/16 financial year and plan to do so for the foreseeable future. Our target for this current financial year was to produce four new ‘rights’ stories (with resource material and each story in translation) for publication on our mobi network over the 12-month period.
Developing these ‘issue-based’ stories is tougher than normal. Not only does one need to develop a compelling narrative that teens and young adults can’t wait to read, but one also has to weave accurate information about the particular human right under discussion into the story and ensure that the way justice is served is real.
Content developer, Ros Haden, has the tough job of commissioning writers for the stories and helping to balance the ‘issue’ with strong characters and an exciting plot.
“This is really hard! Trying to combine the factual information, involve different parties in the process, while giving readers what they love and want, can be very challenging. That said, seeing the finished product and readers’ comments is very rewarding,” says Ros.
To write these stories accurately and effectively we’re working with a range of rights-based organisations to provide us with good advice. We’re particularly grateful to Tim Fish Hodgson from SECTION27 and Meetali Jain and Coline Bruintjes of CLASI for their help with many of these stories. Many other groups and individuals have shared their time and knowledge too.
The time, effort and passion that have gone into these stories have definitely paid off.
“These are very valuable stories as they provide practical information but they are also empowering. The stories stimulate discussion around these important issues and help guide young people in their own daily lives,” Ros adds.
FunDza is proud to be publishing the fourth rights story for the 2015/16 financial year at the end of February. This is the 16th rights story in our series.
To find out more about the Rights Project, click here.