The BAKE Awards 2016 launch
L-R Magunga Williams (Nominee 2014,2015), Rachael Muthoni (winner 2014), Nanjira Sambuli (Research Lead – iHub Research), Kennedy Kachwanya (Chairman, BAKE)
We have launched the Kenyan Blog Awards 2016 today at a breakfast event held at the iHub, Nairobi. The event hosted bloggers and stakeholders in the blogging industry.
The awards have been running since 2012 and this is the fifth year running. An addition to the ever growing awards is the new spirituality category, bringing the total categories to 19.
Speaking at the launch, our chairman Kennedy Kachwanya said that judges go through every blog submitted and nominate the best five in every category. “None of the judges are part of the BAKE team”, he said. “BAKE membership is not mandatory for consideration in the BAKE awards”, Kachwanya said.
The awards submission phase will run up to February 10, followed by the judging phase from 11th February to 28th February, 2016. The team of judges is usually diverse comprising of bloggers and media experts. Previous judges include Juliana Rotich, Pinky Ghelani, Philip Mwaniki and Mbugua Njihia. This year’s judges will be announced before commencement of the judging phase.
Over the years, there are certain recurrent trends that can be observed. There are more male than female bloggers. There has been an upward progression over the years in the number of blogs submitted and nominated. For instance, the blogs submitted last year were 52 male and 30 female owned. This was an improvement compared to 2012, 41 male and 13 female owned blogs.
More ladies need to come up in Business, Science, Agricultural and Tech categories. “We foresee an improvement this year as more ladies get involved in such niche fields”, an observation made by BAKE’s administration manager, Jane Muthoni, in a presentation made during the launch.
There have been 9 recurrent winners out of 60, translating to 15% ever since the inception of the awards”, Muthoni said. Some recurring winners have been from Creative- Jackson Biko, Technology- Sam Wakoba, Business- Limo Taboi and Food- Chadni Solanki. The same blogs keep on being submitted over the years.
You can access the KBA Launch Presentation here.
We encourage more people to vote once the voting phase begins. The number of voters has also been constantly increasing as shown by the graphic below.
We have received suggestions to add sub categories and new categories. This is an area which we could look into in the future, based on the number of blogs in those categories. “Kindly ensure your blogs are submitted in the correct category to ease the filtering process by the judges”, said Kachwanya. “Any late submissions or votes will not be considered”, he added.
Magunga Williams, a creative blogger said that the awards encourage bloggers improve their content. “Bloggers should understand that it’s not their right to win” he said. “It should be a chance to look at the winning content and emulate what they are doing better”, he added.
Currently, we have over 3000 submissions which we expect to double toward the end of the submission phase. The public voting will open on March 2nd- April 30th followed by the Awards gala on May 7th 2016.
