COUNTRY Director, Pathfinder International, Nigeria, Dr Amina Aminu Dorayi says its training of trainers for media was to ensure sustained advocacy for family planning and that they could step down their accrued skills even with the expiration of the Advanced Family project in the country.
Dr Dorayi, speaking at the opening of the 4-day training for media and social media influencers from 10 states in Nigeria, including the Federal Capital Territory, said the journalists were being trained to further impart their communities better and ensure a wider pool of journalists with capacity for both training and advocacy.
According to him, “the project is gradually coming to an end and one of the key things we need to do is to work with journalists to ensure that they continue to have the capacity and skills to sustain advocacy for family planning.
“The project is actually aimed at working with policymakers, government stakeholders and communities to increase commitment towards family planning budget towards policy implementation for family planning which will impact on the overall reproductive health of women and also of families in general.
“And so if we bring in more capacity as we are leaving this project, it will mean that at least there will still be that capacity to communicate with policymakers and this we call a smart advocacy through knowing who the policymakers are, trying to reach out to them and ensure that the advocacy objective is meant to improve the health of our women and our girls in Nigeria.”
Senior Programme Advisor on Reproductive Health, Pathfinder International, Nigeria, Dr Sakina Bello stated that the training is aimed at building a strong media advocate to mentor upcoming journalists, which will also be producing a facilitator’s guide to show the step to step procedure for the training of media advocates for family planning.
Mr Aslem Okolo, the training facilitator, said for a good step down training on advocacy family planning, starts with understanding the gaps the training should fill and having a guide to help systemically draw up a training programme to fill that gap.
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