My Journey

My Name is Jacqueline Lawrence, I grew up in a small family of 3 children from my mother an entrepreneur and my father an engineer. In a small growing vibrant city in Tanzania called Dar Es Salaam. I grew up watching my parents strive to establish their companies and later worked in their companies as soon as I completed my secondary education. My mother was a hard working woman running printing company in the later 90's however the company died 5 years later due to lack of enough financial support to sustain it , while my fathers company soared to become one of Tanzania's biggest local construction firm working in the two companies taught me a lot of management and entrepreneurship and financial sustainability. I went to university to pursue international business studies and journalism and start my own company, however as soon as I returned I took charge of one my fathers companies which had been dying due to lack of proper management. After watching my mothers company die, I was not going to let another company within the family die too. I moved to Mbeya, the small city where the media company was located and later became the director of the company after reviving it and generating enough profits for it to sustain itself for 4 years.

The biggest challenge I am facing as a Media director running a radio in a small city is convincing the business people to use modern means in business and drop traditional means of doing business. People in this city I reside in do not believe in advertising and are not very open to radio advertising for their businesses, unaware that it would open big opportunities for them in their businesses.

Women in my community are not being made to feel like they are able to carry out same tasks as men, equality is still a song sung only to some ears while some barely understand it. I would like to induce the power of hunger of possibility to women from young age, primary schools and secondary schools, empower women in groups and forums show them what other women around the world are doing and make them feel it is able! Society still doesn't uphold fully the notion that a woman can do everything and anything and this is dangerous for a growing community to believe women are only capable of small tasks and jobs that dont require much work or attention.

With My Media I conduct Live forums within every districts where I uphold equality of all sexes and empower women on their positions in the society.

Empowering more women with other women, women for women, together we can encourage each other. And when we start to empower women from young age, youth to campaigns of young women to already working women, we will see more results.

Tanzania Media Foundation is enabling me to conduct live debates all across the southern highlands of Tanzania.

I need more support to establish a more powerful empowering women support campaign programs, to travel to female schools all across the country with powerful women in different industries showcase their work and experience and talk to young women as well talks with other working entrepreneurial women.

Jacqueline is young entrepreneur who runs a radio in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania whose main objectives is to help businesses in the region grow, focus on growing entrepreneurship in the region and introduce new modern means of doing business to the very traditional rregion of Mbeya. She also conducts special programs to help the community she lives in to address key problems affecting the community by ensuring open transparent governments and accountability by providing a platform of discussions among Local Governments and the public in form of public forums.

Jacqueline believes in self sufficient sustainable societies and upholds the idea within every society, every problem has a solution right among-st them, all it takes is someone to ignite the fire. That someone can be media, by providing necessary information to the people and ensuring their voices are heard, that someone can be the Local government by providing public services correctly and that someone can the people themselves by practicing problem solving meetings and techniques and working together as a community, Jacqueline believes in Media for change and has long used her media to bring light to matters that have been abandoned.

There are many sectors Jacqueline wants to improve in her region and in Tanzania in general and believes she can do this with media alone, entrepreneurship among young people, public services in Urban areas and access to information in rural areas. These are areas very close to development and media has a big art in ensuring all these areas are dealt with by media watchdogs of the government and the public. With good public services the people can practice better businesses and produce more and this can lead to a rise in GDP in the country. With good entrepreneurship skills among our young people, more businesses will be started generating more income for the nation and more employment for our nations young people and again more growth to our economy. And with information to rural areas, the country can be connected, an informed person is a person who can bring about change and can do more for their country and demand their rights as citizens and ensure an open more accountable government.

There are many problems surrounding Tanzania as country in areas concerning development,Jacqueline wishes all areas had the same or close levels of development or urbanization her personal aspiration in life is contribute to the development agenda in my country, to leave a mark to make a change. To leave behind a more learned youth a problem solving society that wont fall back and relax at the emergence of a problem but react as a community and tackle it with confidence. This can be done by media, this can be done by engaging the youth early one because they are tomorrow.

I have currently established 2 new companies within My region, a Magazine and a Warehouse storage facility for grains and cereals