Regional Guide

Regional Breakdown- A Guide to Communicating Within Each Region in Tanzania

For development practitioners planning communication strategies in specific regions within Tanzania, it might be more effective to focus on the media-information environment in that specific region, than to look at overall national trend. Sometimes popular national stations, channels and newspapers may be effective in reaching a broad swath of Tanzanians, but not so effective in reaching deep into a specific region. For more targeted strategies, we present a region-by-region breakdown of the top news and information sources in Tanzania.

Tanzania is divided into 26 regions (mkoa), 21 on the mainland and 5 in Zanzibar: Arusha, Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Iringa, Kagera, Kigoma, Kilimanjaro, Lindi, Manyara, Mara, Mbeya, Morogoro, Mtwara, Mwanza, Pwani, Rukwa, Ruvuma , Shinyanga, Singida, Tabora, Tanga, Zanzibar (Zanzibar is further divided into Pemba North, Pemba South, Zanzibar Central/South, Zanzibar North, Zanzibar Urban/West, but for this survey all were taken together, making a total of 22 regions covered).

A regional breakdown may also be useful to highlight community radio stations that are popular in their respective regions, but fail to show up on our nationally popular ratings. Most of these are funded by nonprofit organizations. Community broadcasting is expanding, however, as reported by the 2010 AfroBarometer study, which found outlets supported through private and institutional (religious) ownership. Also, some community radio stations have been established by politicians to boost their popularity in their constituencies. In some instances, these community radio stations (or newspapers or television stations) might be more effective in reaching target audiences within a region.

We divided all 22 regions into three groupings: Regions with High and Diverse Media Use, Regions with Moderate Broadcast Media Use; Scarce Newspaper Readership and Regions where Radio Use Dominates. We have tracked the percentage of respondents who mentioned a media outlet (radio, television or newspaper) as one of the three they listen/watch/read most often for each region. Every outlet with more than 15 percent of respondents mentioning it is included.

Regions with High and Diverse Media Use: Typically in these regions, radio use is very high and near universal; but television and newspaper use are also higher than average (see Figure 15). This means Tanzanians in this region have a wide variety of news and information available. These also tend to be regions where the majority of respondents have Tier 2 and 3 incomes. There are some minor exceptions such as Tanga, where newspaper readership is above average, but television use is below average. Generally speaking, however, these are regions with moderate to high use of all three media.

Figure 1

In regions such as Dar es Salaam, where many stations generate their broadcasts, no single station dominates the radio scene completely. In terms of television (which a larger proportion of residents watch here), ITV and TBC 1 are most popular. A wide variety of newspapers, in addition to the nationally popular ones, are also read.
(For details on media use in these regions, see Appendix below)

Regions with Moderate Broadcast Media Use and Scarce Newspaper Readership: These are regions with moderate to below average television use and very scarce newspaper readership; although radio use remains high. There is some variation in this grouping – in affluent regions such as Arusha, television use is 65 percent, much higher than the national average, while newspaper use is closer to average; while regions such as Shinyanga have particularly low television and newspaper use. But neither had a sample size of newspaper readers large enough to present more details on newspaper readership.

Generally speaking, these are regions where, in addition to radio, television can be used in some cases to target messages, but newspaper readership is low enough to not be recommended for a communication strategy. (For details on media use in these regions, see Appendix below.)

Figure 2

Identifying Gaps: Regions with Few Media Users and Limited Media Diversity
These regions have a lower than average proportion of television viewers and newspapers readers. Regions such as Pwani and Dodoma have somewhat greater proportion of television viewers, but the sample size was still too small to provide any more details on television viewership. In these regions, communication strategies should focus on dissemination via radio.

Figure 3

Ruvuma, Morogoro, Lindi and Pwani (see map above) all have a particularly low concentration of television or newspaper users.
These adjacent regions have fewer concentrations of media users, and their choice of available stations is limited. When compared with those residing in regions with high and diverse media use, these regions emerge as those most needing greater media development strategies. Media development organizations in Tanzania must focus on these regions. (For details on media use in these regions, see Appendix below.)

References: Tanzania Report 2010 African Media Barometer. Published by the Media Institute of South Africa and FES Media Africa. Available here: http://www.misa.org/programme/mediamonitoring/AMB%20Tanzania%202010.pdf, Pg 39

Appendix

Regions with High and Diverse Media Use