Jacqueline Lawrence

How media transforms our communities

Jacqueline Lawrence when she was just 15 years old in a remote village in Mbeya the southern of Tanzanian, the speaker wrote a letter to the president about an impassable road, and its publication created a "momentum" that eventually led to the road being fixed. This experience taught her the incredible power of media. Today, she runs a media house, Highlands FM radio, that makes invisible stories visible, sharing community needs with organizations to create impactful change. She argues that media is not just an accessory for entertainment; it is the fundamental infrastructure for development. The most developed cities are the most connected. She points to a 14th-century African example: King Mansa Musa, whose use of messengers and scrolls to announce his pilgrimage created trade routes and transformed villages into the great cities of Gao, Timbuktu, and Cairo. Communication is so critical that failed policies are often "communication failure[s]" because the public cannot understand their advantages. Jacqueline’s vision is to collectively as an African people to replicate this transformative power across the continent by building larger media houses that can make every African community visible and connected, enabling seamless, cross-border trade. Such a medium would also be essential for building a better global narrative for Africa—one that shouts about the continent's "courage, our innovation, our creativity, [and] our culture". This movement requires co-creation, where citizens can actively share their stories, and it demands that policies and regulations support the growth of these media houses. The growth of media is the growth of economies. The key to this profound change, she concludes, is momentum. Find out why communication should be the 18th Sustainable Development Goal. Jacqueline Lawrence is a visionary serial entrepreneur and award-winning media leader dedicated to building self-sufficient and sustainable societies. As the Director of Highlands FM Rad