Kelele African Bloggers Conference 2009 Postponed

When i first heard of Kelele: An annual African Bloggers conference i was very excited, optimistic and pessimistic in the same vein.Why? For one ,i was pleased that such a noble initiative that would result in the promotion of African Content by African Bloggers and lead to better communication,co-operation and networking of African Bloggers was being launched. On the other hand, i was certain that the initiative would hardly be a success if local corporates i.e. African Companies,NGO' s and Governments did not step in to fund the initiative.True to it, there was not sufficient local donors and the organizers were depending on international sponsors who due to the Global Economic crunch are cash strained to support ' non- fundamental/essential ' projects at the moment. So for the second time the KELELE AFRICAN BLOGGERS CONFERENCE had to be postponed.

The regret at the site partly reads:

"The inaugural African Bloggers Conference dubbed ‘Kelele’ (Swahili for Noise) has been postponed to mid 2010....we would like to apologize for this the 2nd postponement of the African Bloggers Conference—KELELE—which was due to take place from 29th October to 1st November 2009 in Nairobi, Kenya. There are two main reasons that have made this postponement necessary.


Firstly, the African Bloggers Conference is an initiative of several African bloggers and as the organizers, we required significant financial support to underwrite the event. Although many sponsors had initially expressed interest in being a part of this great undertaking, due to the prevailing global economic climate they did not come through as we had anticipated.
Secondly, it has been challenging to secure a truly pan African programme for the conference in the time we had available. .. If we had held the conference in the next two weeks it would have been an East African bloggers conference which we felt would betray our key aims.


To this end we took the difficult decision over the weekend to postpone Kelele again to the new year to give us sufficient time to secure all the necessary partnerships and resources while at the same time increasing the level of participation from across the continent".

That news definately has disheartened many bloggers in the continent but in the same vein encouraged them to more actively engage the community around them to see the importance of supporting such initiatives that can result in much good for the African Blogosphere.