Hi, this is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Tony Do or Tony Anwuchekwa, and our topic is the power of podcasting in Africa. Tony Do is an audio content strategist with years of experience on air in production and management for multiformat radio stations, most recently at 93.7 on Chicha at 93.7 f m on Nietzsche, where he led a team of on air talents as programs manager to top three status in the region, growing the audience share by 75% in just 3 months.

He currently curates, produces, and hosts the informative hybrid newsletter slash podcast into the Podversed, which explores challenges and opportunities for podcasters from an African perspective. Tony, welcome to the Awarepreneur show.

Thanks for having me, Paul. Hello.

You've been doing great work for a long time, and our audience is super excited to learn about podcasting in Africa with the opportunities, the challenges. But before we get into that, Tony, just give us a little bit of background. How did you get so excited about podcasting in Africa?

Let's see. Well, let let's take it back a bit. I do have a radio background, and as you noted an introduction. So even while I worked on radio, I was doing a lot of I didn't come up with a term. I know I saw it somewhere, time shifted audio, which, you know, basically mean means audio on demand. So I played around with, you know, such ideas. And, originally, what I was trying to do was create content for syndication, which I did. I have one of 2 friends I was producing for at the time.

It was a paid gig. And it then evolved into some and I thought, oh, you know, if I'm doing this for other people, I should be able to do this myself. So in the process of, putting out my own stuff, I began to see and listen to what other people were doing on the continent. And then one of the platforms that drew my attention to what was going on on the rest of the con on the rest of the continent was, Africa Audfest. And they came up with a day to celebrate African podcasts, which I believe is, February 12. And then we started out in 2021. I think I was invited on a virtual panel, and it opened my eyes, opened my ears to, the many wonderful things happening on the rest of the continent. And then I got involved with Afriapods, which is a podcast hosting and monetizing platform on the continent based in Kenya.

And I was basically the business representative for my country, Nigeria, on the platform, and we were working on this convergence of radio and podcasts. It was my job at the time to speak to Nigerian radio stations about the benefits of having their live shows repurposed as podcasts. And it just went on from there. I discovered a lot of things on AfriPods. I discovered other platforms that were also pushing the African narratives forward. There was Jamit. There's still Jamit, by the way. Jollof Radio and so many of them.

So there were also bodies of communities in Nigeria that I became a part of helping to bring these communities together or bring these individuals into communities. We have the Naija Pod Hub, a creative partner with the Association of Podcasters and Voice Over Artists. And many of them began to pop up. So the conversations were getting louder. The conversations were getting clearer. There were people from all over the continent who were like, you know, it's about time we stepped forward and told our stories our own way. And, we really may not need traditional media or mainstream media to tell these stories if we have these platforms we can use. And, of course, Anchor, which is now Spotify for podcasters, became the most popular, podcast hosting platforms for African content creators.