Uga Uga Press Agency
Uga Uga began as an experimental collaboration between UNICEF and the Education Department of Manaus. The program intended to use the media to make students into actors within the schools. Though it wanted to have an impact in the whole city, Manaus has some two million citizens and 300 public schools, so the project began in several cities in the poor eastern shantytowns.
The program (still without the name Uga Uga) found several organized youth groups: actors, musicians, and activists. UNICEF staff trained these teenagers in journalism and provided a budget to produce a “Fanzine” (an informal magazine). The teenagers who worked on this project are now in their 20s and have become the staff of Uga Uga.
After the young journalists had written and laid out the first issue, with many articles on issues important to youth, they realized that the magazine had no name. They wanted to avoid the clichés that people had used before, and several staff writers were fans of Captain Caveman. No one thinks that Captain Caveman will succeed, but he always overcomes the challenges while screaming “Uga Uga!” From then on, the project’s name was fixed.
UNICEF was impressed with the experiment, so it funded an expansion to 6 other city schools. These new grassroots clubs could create magazines about whatever they thought was important -- some wrote about drug abuse, others about violence, others about ecology. The young journalists from Uga-Uga were the models and teachers for their peers.
The six groups met regularly to plan city-wide activities, but a problem soon arose: the students from the best and most famous school wouldn’t allow anyone else to lead. The conflict threatened to split the program, so Uga-Uga let the famous school set up an independent magazine and invited another school to join in its place.
After the publication of each of the magazines, Uga Uga sponsors a “debate circle” in each school, where the journalists can talk to their peers about the issues raised in the magazine. There are no lectures; it is a democratic space where anyone can speak.
When the Uga Uga journalists trained the staffs of the new fanzines, writing and layout workshops were easy. The problem was professional ethics. Young journalists who wanted instant changes in their schools were ready to publish gossip or attack school principals without facts, so trainers put lots of effort into teaching that journalists have a responsibility to the truth. Students pointed out that local newspapers didn’t pay any attention to these ethical standards, but the trainers finally got the idea over by saying that young journalists should be a model for their professional peers.
With the help of ANDI and UNICEF, Uga Uga became independent in 2000. It continues to train young journalists in the schools, but it has expanded to do research on the media. Recent projects have included one on the image of youth in the media and another on violence. Uga Uga, inspired by ANDI, has also begun workshops to teach journalists about the life of children and youth in Manaus.
Today, Uga Uga works in 14 schools. There are 21 educators, most of whom began as young journalists in the first years of Uga Uga. Uga Uga distributes 13,000 copies to 19 schools, and the fanzines reach an even broader public.
Agência de Comunicação Uga Uga
Conjunto Jardim Espanha III, Q 01 C 19
Efigênio Sales, Parque 10, Manaus, AM 69020 060
www.agenciaugauga.org.br
Contactos: Eneida Marques, Diretora Executiva, agencia@agenciaugauga.org.br
Equipo de Mobilização Social (Graça y Neiry), mobilizacao@agenciaugauga.org.br
