The organisers of the All Africa Music Awards (AFRIMA) have announced that preparations are far advanced to make the maiden edition of the awards ceremony which will take place in Lagos, Nigeria a successful one.

The event, which would be held in October 21-25, 2014, seeks to foster the development of the Africa music industry and reward industry players who have contributed immensely towards the development of African music.

With only two months to the event, the organisers have disclosed that the event would bring together the best of African international artistes to celebrate the event with music fans with live performances that would be broadcast to 84 countries on 109 television stations around the world.

Last week, the international committee of AFRIMA unveiled members of the jury to the media on Tuesday in an interactive event held at Ibis Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria.

Speaking at the event, the Executive Producer, Mike Dada reiterated the core values of the AFRIMA which include fairness, authenticity, creativity, excellence, integrity and transparency.

“In line with our integrity and transparency values, we are trying to ensure that the adjudication process, pre-selection process, the auditing phase, the nomination process and the eventual voting process are all transparent.

We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. We’ve seen many awards where the people and followers of music in Africa have questioned the integrity and transparency of these awards.

As such, we deliberated and did a lot of research and finally had a model that is the 13-person jury panel and 527 members of the Academy,” he said.

On his part, a member of the jury, Oscar Kidjo, said “This is the first time where professionals in the music industry in Africa will come together to live up to the vision of Africa."

"Africa has great talents, but the problem is with quality of their production. Out of the 2,025 entries received, 60 percent had good quality videos. This shows the quality of music we have in Africa," he said.