Following the Let Your Voices Roar animation training for women from East Africa, and the successful completion of a six-month incubator phase, The Ladima Foundation, in partnership with Culture and Development East Africa (CDEA), is proud to award the five selected East African women.
The five women were selected to take part in the six-month incubator in partnership with CDEA and The African Animation Network (AAN). They are Nsile James Uiso (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), Adelaide Barnabas Jachi (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), Zuwena Hamad Othman (Zanzibar, Tanzania), and Gwantwa Lucas Mwakalinga (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) who participated in the incubator at Naota Studios (Kenya) under the guidance of Naota’s CEO, Lydiah Mugure Mwangi. Ruth Nazzinda (Kampala, Uganda) was incubated at Creatures Animation (Uganda) under the guidance of Raymond Malinga, CEO of Creatures Animation. The incubated women gained invaluable work experience that will serve them well as they commence their careers in the animation space.
In order to better equip these women to excel in the animation industry, The Ladima Foundation is awarding each woman with a new Apple laptop. The awards ceremony will take place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 8 March 2023.
This animation incubator is just one of the initiatives of the Ladima Film Academy, the training and professional development pillar of the Ladima Foundation and CDEA’s Film Incubator Initiative. The Ladima Film Academy works through partnerships to provide women across Africa with access to free online and limited in-person training across seven disciplines: editing, producing, scriptwriting, documentary filmmaking, animation, directing and cinematography.
The Top 5 selected participants are:
Adelaide Jachi
Adelaide Jachi is a passionate and collaborative 2D animator striving to deliver edu-entertaining content. Her objective is to put out as much African-made animation content as possible, that reflects our culture. Her areas of interest include digital illustrating, voice over recording, 2D animating, rigging, and visual effects.
Gwantwa Lucas
Gwantwa Lucas is a 3D and 2D animator, writer and filmmaker with a passion to tell African stories for the younger generations though animation. She strives toward creating female heroes so that an African girl child can see herself in. Her dream is to take African stories to the world stage.
Nsile Uiso
Nsile Uiso is an animator and illustrator with a passion for creating content that tells stories about societal issues that affect girls and women like menstrual health and gender based violence. She has completed her bachelor’s degree in Multimedia and Animation at the University of Dodoma and is currently an Animator at TAI Tanzania – an NGO dealing with telling stories for social change. She aspires to create content that motivates change in the community.
Ruth Nazzinda
Nazzinda Ruth is a Ugandan woman, passionate about documentary filmmaking that impacts communities. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, who studied Film Production at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and the Ladima Film Academy. She also studied Journalism and Mass Communication at Buganda Royal Institute. Ruth is currently working at Garage Women Foundation as an executive director and OLa Visualz as a documentary filmmaker. She has worked on various film projects including Mmamba – a short animated documentary film – as an animator, director, writer, and editor. The animated short is about cultural identity and climate conservation.
Zuwena Hamad Othman
Zuwena is a 27 year old photographer, videographer and filmmaker from Zanzibar, Tanzania. She is committed to educating her fellow youth on matters concerning the environment, education, reproductive health and culture. She is also passionate about helping girls achieve their dreams.