Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) released it’s 3 months report on local content monitoring as the regulator, monitor and enforcer of the standards relating to local content in Uganda. And Nile Broadcasting Services (NBS) had 30.4% off the 705 allocated to local stations.
According to the National Broadcasting Policy, Local content is defined as “content that recognises the cultural and linguistic diversity of Uganda carrying themes of relevance to the local audience and produced under Ugandan’s creative control”. The monitoring for local content programmes of the television stations was done for a period of three months starting from January to March 2014 from 6.00pm to 11.00pm.
UCC identified the genres of drama, documentary, sports and children as needing special attention hence it set a 70% local content quota with special attention on these four genres as follows: drama (50%), documentary (10%), and sports (5%) and children (5%) and foreign content at (30%).
According to the report Nile Broadcasting Services (NBS) achieved the highest with 30.4%, followed by Top TV 21.7%, Bukedde1 18.3%, Star TV and Uganda Broadcasting Television had 13.4%, NTV 10.4%, WBS 9.4%, Bukedde 2 at 8.4%, Urban TV 8%, Record TV 1.8%, and Citizen TV 0.8%.
The station that were monitored were Bukedde 1, Bukedde 2, Channel 44 (Miracle TV), Citizen TV, East Africa TV, ITV, LTV, NBS, NTV, Record TV, Star TV, Top TV, UBC, Urban TV and WBS.
These stations ITV, LTV, East Africa TV; Channel TV (Miracle TV) achieved 0% thus a clear indication that they did not show
any of the required local content as per the set quota.