Malawi to host Creative Training Campus

This year, young music enthusiasts from Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe will be given the opportunity to participate in three workshops and six training sessions involving audio engineering, cultural management, instrument building and repair, music pedagogy, melodic reading, transcribing, instrument and ensemble classes as well as capacity building.

“The aim of the project is to develop the technical skills of young musicians, enable them to generate income and improve their overall capacities in order to find their place in the industry,” a CTC press statement reads.

“The campus proposes a variety of capacity building trainings to more than 100 participants and this year will take place in Lilongwe, Malawi. The project is being co-funded by the European Union Cooperation (Erasmus+) and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“Incorporated is also the continued teacher training for our Music Crossroads Academies. Coordinated and administered by the Global Music Academy, this training will equip the trainees with skills in reading, writing and documenting music, which will then be passed on to future students for years to come and will allow them to document their own musical cultures.”

MCI director Joe Herrmann told Music In Africa that the the 2017 CTC was modelled on last year’s campus, which was held in Harare, Zimbabwe. “Trainees have been selected mainly on the continuity of last year. People who are already using the skills we taught them are the ones we want to invest in,” he said.

“The aim of this project is to enable young people to have the know-how in aspects of the creative industry that have been overlooked. We will have 12 trainees per technical workshop and 20 for the cultural management workshop. We are also looking at 25 teacher trainees.”

Herrmann also spoke about how the campus had started. “The first CTC took place in Harare in 2016. However, we have trained our teachers at our Music Crossroads Academies yearly since the inception of the project back in 2012. The first training for some of our first teachers took place in 2009. What we introduced last year is this Creative Training Campus as a project, which now includes skills training for talented young people.”

He said the project had yielded positive results because the majority of last year’s participants were now professionally implementing the skills they had acquired.

“We administered surveys for monitoring and evaluation with all participants before and after last year’s CTC. Some 98% of participants asked us to do another campus. Six months later another survey revealed that more than 50% of the participants were using the newly learnt skills, and we are only at the start of this initiative.”

But Herrmann said the project did not come without logistical hurdles. “Transport and accommodation of 60-plus people is a tricky thing to organise, especially when we have funding limits, and the efficiency of the trainings could have been better, as there were too many participants in the classes,” he said.

“This year we have gone into the planning knowing these challenges and have addressed them from the start. We have limited the number of participants for the workshops to maximise the learning outcome for all participants.”

The CTC would aim to hold the campus in Mozambique in 2018, Herrmann said.

For more information visit the MCI official website.