KAMPALA – Alkebulan TV (AKTV), a pioneering online streaming platform dedicated to promoting African culture, tourism, agriculture, and economic resources has gone live in Uganda.
The streaming application launched on Friday, December 8, will give a platform for promoting the richness and diversity of the African culture to help support economic development, said Moses Kazibwe, the founder and Chief Executive officer.
“What prompted me to open up this television is the recognition of the untapped potential we hold in various agriculture, tourism, abundant resources, and an unparalleled cultural heritage. With the launch of Alkebulan TV, we have a platform to celebrate Africa’s richness and showcase its economic potential to the rest of the world,” he said at the grand launch in Kampala.
The word “Alkebulan” represents the indigenous name for the African continent, reflecting the platform’s commitment to showcasing Africa’s diversity, beauty, and untapped potential.
Kazibwe said Africa, blessed with the finest soils gifted to “us by the Creator, enables us to cultivate organic produce without the need for fertilizers. This divine endowment is something we must cherish and utilize to its fullest extent”.
“In the realm of trade, the markets we have in Africa, if properly organized, can be sufficient to make Africa a proud continent. Let us unite as Africans, transcending political boundaries, and collectively embark on the journey to build a brighter Africa through Alkebulan TV,” he added.
The state minister in charge of general duties in the Office of the Prime Minister, Justine Kasule Lumumba commended Mr. Kazibwe for investing in promoting local content.
Ms. Lumumba said that culture plays a key role in the country’s development, asking that Ugandans as Africans to appreciate their own culture.
“Traditional and religious leaders and their institutions must come in to promote and save our culture from vanishing. The success of the Ugandan story will be the success of the country and Africa at large. We need to tell our own stories or else somebody else will tell it and we might not have the power to change how it is told,” Lumumba said.
Dr. Steven Rwangyezi, the proprietor of Ndere Cultural Centre asked the government to prioritize investment in local content creation to ensure the Ugandan story is told by its people.
“We need to sponsor research, capture authentic knowledge, put it in structured books and make them reference materials, put them in curriculum and have it from nursery to university. If the content we are to create is devoid of our culture we risk falling into boring content from script writers,” Rwangyezi said.
“If we get something the whites have not had the opportunity to access, we are going to have a fresh breath of content from an area no one has accessed.”
“If we can sponsor research and documentation about us, we will be able to change the narrative. We are blaming schools for teaching western dances and songs to learners but teachers in schools don’t know our traditional songs and there is no library for this. We need to sponsor research about food, architecture, medicine, food, etc. We need to research this. We are not going to compete or survive as a continent if the new media does not play our content. It is not that Africa lacks content but we have failed to go out to tell its own story,” Rwangyezi said.
Mr. Allan Butali, who is behind the production of local content said the platform offers key benefits including cultural shows, tourism promotion, agricultural insights, and economic empowerment through highlighting investment opportunities and entrepreneurial success stories across the continent, showcasing Africa’s potential as a hub for innovation and growth.
