UN Women trains journalists on peace, conflicts reporting

The programme which is titled “Promoting Women’s Engagement in Peace and Security in Northern Nigeria” is geared towards enhancing women’s participation in peace building, and is implemented by UN Women Nigeria in partnership with UNICEF, with support from the EU.Participants for the one day training programme held in Jos on August 19 were drawn from […]

The programme which is titled “Promoting Women’s Engagement in Peace and Security in Northern Nigeria” is geared towards enhancing women’s participation in peace building, and is implemented by UN Women Nigeria in partnership with UNICEF, with support from the EU.
Participants for the one day training programme held in Jos on August 19 were drawn from Abuja and the three northern states in which the programme will be implemented and they are; Gombe, Adamawa and Plateau states. The trained journalists are expected to form a support mechanism towards promoting women’s engagement in peace and security in northern Nigeria.
 Speaking during the workshop, UN Women Representative to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Dr Grace Ongile said journalists have a duty to do their job well for the country and owe the people accountability in the way they report peace, security and conflicts.
 While urging the journalists to reflect on what changes they can make or contribute to the involvement of women in peace processes, she urged them to always get their facts, figures and methodology right before picking their tools of reporting.
 She also encouraged the journalists to build relationships and be agents of change, adding that  the workshop was organised for them to learn as learning has no end.
UN Women Nigeria lead Media Consultant,  Mrs Moji Makanjuola, in her presentation on the topic “Promoting Women’s engagement in Peace and Security –the Role of the Media,” said journalists can fuel crises when they don’t report facts. She tasked journalists on the need to go beyond the traditional disengaged journalistic role to become more proactive as peace facilitators in the field. “We also need to form a corps of journalists that will play this role especially for the project and beyond,” she said.
Prince Dickson, a resource person at the workshop in his presentation on peace and security concepts said each time  journalists write stories they should have at the back of their minds if they will reduce or stop the conflict as they cannot take sides.
He harped on the need for journalists to seek understanding about issues before writing on them saying without it they cannot write well.
 He said “for journalists to write stories on peace and security, the stories should be made human, all sides should be reported ;  journalists should seek accurate and impartial news, more people should be made interested in the story, identify underlining interest, avoid words that offend people, avoid religious and racial profiling, avoid what divides the sides of a conflict and avoiding misuse of words such as genocide, eye witness,  among others”
 The participants were also enlightened on the concept of gender and it terms and given an overview of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 by Peter Mancha of UN Women. This was followed by group work by the participants.
 Earlier in her remarks, Commissioner for Information and Communication Plateau state, Mrs Olivier Dazyam thanked UN Women for making Plateau one of the implementing states saying women and children have gone through various security challenges in the state.