Media schooled on social media campaign

By Yaw Ansah, GNA

Accra, March 9, GNA – Scores of media practitioners have received training on how to use social media applications to accurately report on migration issues.

The training will also help practitioners to educate potential migrants and the host residents to gain the necessary knowledge to promote migrants’ rights, safer migration practices and inform the destination choices of regular migrants.

Speaking at a three-day workshop, Mr Samuel Dodoo, Executive Director of Media Response, noted that, there was a low level of knowledge and understanding of national and international frameworks for migration among journalists.  

To this end, he said, Media Response with funding from the European Union and the ECOWAS Commission would conduct a series of training workshops on investigative journalism on free movement and migration for journalists in, Greater Accra, Western, Ashanti and Northern Regions.

“The rationale for the training is based on the assumption that knowledge of the various legal frameworks that promote the free movement of persons as well as the protection of migrants by journalists and field correspondents is essential for the promotion of safer migration practices and informing the destination choices of regular migrants,” he remarked.

He said the training would strengthen the capacity of journalists by equipping them with media tools use for campaigns and mobile applications to conduct accurate investigative reporting on free movement and migration.

Mr Eric Akomany, Project Assistant, Migration, and Development at International Organisation of Migration (IOM) noted that, migrants were perceived to be people who do not contribute to the development of the host countries and put pressure on state resources, but on the other side, they support the receiving country with their professional skills.

Migration plays a crucial role in all aspect of the development of every country, he said, adding that, they contributed to the nations through remittances and stipends, which was used to build and for the educational needs of family members.

While defining irregular migration as a process of traveling to another country without the needed documentation, he explained that when an individual embarks on regular migration the fellow becomes protected.

“When a migration is regular the person will feel safe but if the fellow does not go through the right process to migrate the individual becomes vulnerable at the transits locations and suffer maltreatment, abuses as well as exploitation,” he added.

Majority of the participants the GNA spoke to noted that, the training had exposed and deepened their understanding of social media campaign design as well as available tools to employ for their reportage.

Ms Seli Abena Azanku, from Global Media Alliance said the workshop has helped her to understand the dynamics of running public media campaigns, and how to incorporate social media into practice.

“We learned that we can have varied discourses on migration and also learned how to initiate campaigns to deal with the issue of free movement and migration,” she added.

Mr Bright Amaning, a participant remarked that he has been enlightened on several ways of reporting on issues of migration around the world, and how fast information could be transmitted.

Over the three-day period, participants were taken through both theoretical and practical topics including social media use in news reporting, database and application management, monitoring of social media platforms, how to design blogs and awareness campaigns.

GNA

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