Details

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation was one of a handful of funders, including NIZA and the SABC to provide support for a team to report on the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva. THe KAS provided technical assistance and scholarships for the news agency.

HANA additionally covered the World Telecomms Africa Summit in Cairo, Egypt and the WSIS Preparatory Committee (Prepcom) meeting in Tunisia.

During the summit, HANA presented an African perspective of the proceedings to newspapers, radio stations and internet sites on the continent.

HANA was set up to provide African media with free coverage of this United Nations summit that aimed to lay the groundwork for a global information society. Without assistance of the KAS and like-minded organisations, African coverage of the summit would have been marginalised due to the prohibitive cost of travel to the summit and the need for skilled journalists to cover proceedings - a situation reflective of the digital rift between developed and developing nations.

The Highway Africa News Agency (HANA) was an offshoot of the Highway Africa Conference organised by the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University.