Feature: Tanzanian women see bright future in photography
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E-mail Xinhua, September 19, 2021
DAR ES SALAAM, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Lorraine Shose, a young woman from a suburb of Tanzania's commercial capital Dar es Salaam, looks forward to getting good money after she completes her training in photography.
Shose, 28, said she joined a training workshop in photography with the Female Photographers Program (FPP), which aims at helping adolescents and young women learn photography for economic empowerment. She believed that the future looks bright.
"I have learned about essentials of photography. I have learned about all the things that I did not know when I started taking a camera," she told Xinhua in an interview.
"This training workshop has opened more opportunities, connections and networking."
Shose is among 60 young women, who have been trained in photography by FPP since 2020. The training enables them to earn a living by taking photographs at weddings, and sports, cultural and religious events.
The training workshop is organized in collaboration with Ladies Joint Forum (LJF), a local non-governmental organization working on women empowerment and rights advocacy.
Fransisca Damian, founder and executive director of LJF, said the main objective of the workshop is to empower girls from marginalized communities with a passion for photography as a career to explore their talents and learn technical skills and creativity in photography.
She said FPP, supported by donors, equips the young women with needed skills to enable them to go to work as independent young women pursuing their careers, and become employment creators.
Most of the young women trained by FPP are girls who are school dropouts on various reasons including pregnancy and single mothers, she said.
Damian said statistics indicate that about 90 percent of photographers in Tanzania are men.
"Photography is a male dominated field in Tanzania. So we thought it is now time to train young women with a passion to photography to enable them to enter the market," she said.
Damian said there are about 500 young women in the queue waiting to be trained in photography.
"There is opportunity of creating employment to young women through photography. I am looking at these young women as pioneers of photography and game changers in Tanzania," said Damian. Enditem
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