About Lakatips
We began in 2009 as Nvesesani — Nyanja for “listen carefully”. The name changed; the job did not.
Updated
Lakatips exists to bring Zambians the news of their own country — all of it, from every province, in one place they can trust and afford to read.
That has been the work for a long time, under an older name.
We began as Nvesesani
On 4 October 2009 we started out as Nvesesani — a Nyanja word meaning listen carefully. The line we carried under it was ears to the ground, and it meant exactly what it says: that a story from Mongu or Kasama or Livingstone matters as much as one filed a mile from Cairo Road, and that you only find those stories if you are listening to every part of the country rather than the loudest part of it.
In 2025 the name changed. Nothing behind it did.
Why Lakatips
Laka is ours — it means good, the best of something. Tips is English, and it means what people actually say to each other: word going round, a thing worth knowing, passed on because it is worth passing on. Put together, Lakatips is the best of what is being said, gathered from every corner of Zambia.
It is the same idea Nvesesani began with, in a name that says it more plainly. We listen widely, and we bring back what is worth your time.
What we are for
Zambia is well served by its journalists. Newsrooms across the country file steadily through the day, and between them they cover far more ground than any one of them could alone. The difficulty has never been a shortage of reporting — it is that the reporting is scattered, and the reader is the one left doing the gathering.
Most people end up checking two or three sites and missing the rest, or relying on whatever a WhatsApp group forwards on — often days old, often stripped of where it came from, and sometimes not true at all. That is the gap we close. One place, the day’s reporting from the newsrooms doing it, and the name of whoever did the reporting attached to it.
How we work with newsrooms
We are not a wire service and we do not take anyone’s work for nothing. Every newsroom on Lakatips is here by agreement, their reporters are named on their stories, and the arrangement is one we intend to keep paying for as we grow. Our network page lists everyone whose work appears here, and the editorial policy and copyright and takedown policy set out the terms for anyone who wants the detail.
We also report ourselves, under our own name, and we intend to do more of it.
What we hold to
- Headlines are not rewritten. Where a newsroom files in block capitals we re-set it in ordinary case so it can be read. The wording stays theirs.
- Advertising buys no position. Commercial placements are labelled, and they never affect which stories appear or where.
- No newsroom crowds out the rest. A cap on how much of the front page one publisher can hold keeps it a picture of the country rather than of its busiest site.
- Every province counts. The whole point of listening carefully is hearing the places that are usually left out.
Where we are
Lakatips is run from Lusaka, at 23 Parirenyetwa Road, Rhodes Park. If you have a correction, a question, a story worth chasing or a commercial enquiry, the contact page has our numbers and email addresses, and somebody reads everything that comes in.
For publishers
If you run a Zambian newsroom and would like to join us, we would like to hear from you. If you are already here and would prefer something about your stories handled differently, write to us and we will act on it.