By Olive Ejang
It is a new dawn in rural communication in Cameroon. We are the voice of communities.
The Ultimate is committed to foster community development through communication. We focus on reports from the hinterlands and act like the voice of communities. It is a paper for the community, by the community.
The Official Gazette of the Republic of Cameroon (1990) has facilitated the free flow of information nationally, which means information flow within the nation should reflect coverage of both urban and rural areas.
Priority Action Plan of Cameroon (2000) guarantees that access to information by citizens improves public management and facilitates development.
Despite this guarantee, media coverage in Cameroon is mostly urban centered. News and information from urban centers dominate radio and television stations, magazine and newspapers daily. Only a small percentage of rural news is published by the media (Tebug 2016).
Since the media plays a major role in fostering development, focusing on urban sector means this part of the nation is more exposed to policies and is fast developing than rural areas which are given very little coverage. Peoples’ voices in rural Cameroon are hardly heard. This inadequacy of rural community exposure by the media certainly retard or slowdown development.
The Ultimate therefore sets to bridge this gap of media imbalance of news coverage in urban and rural Cameroon.
