The Journalists Against Polio (JAP) and Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (VPD) in conjunction with Adamawa State Primary Health Care Development Agency (ADSPHCDA) and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) have organised a Media Sensitisation Training on COVID-19 Reportage and how to get to stay safe while on duty, for journalists in Adamawa State.
Hosted by COVID-19 Media Sensitisation Training on Covering, Reporting and Programme on COVID -19, the professional exercise was declared opened Tuesday, at the Banquet Hall of the Government House in Yola, Adamawa State, Northeast Nigeria.
The organisers revealed that the training was with the aim of engaging the participants to take responsibility of being core components of COVID-19 intervention, which emphasised the need for journalists to be professionals, maintain an ethical standard, to be accurate and objective, while gathering and disseminating information to the general public on COVID-19, considered as a global pandemic.
Speaking during the opening ceremony, the Chairman COVID-19 Containment Committee and Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Eng Bashir Ahmad, commended the organisers of the training.
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The SSG who was represented by the Honourable Commissioner of Health, Prof. Abdullahi Isa said, Adamawa State Government has confronted the challenge wholeheartedly, by taking preventive and considering proactive measures to contain the coronavirus, in the event, it was visited on the state.
Corroborating, the Commissioner of Information and Strategy, Dr Umar Garba Pella said, the collaborative engagement, proactively too, was very significant, considering the alarming rate of the global pandemic.
Pella said Adamawa, joining other states, was being confronted by war never to surrender; hence the need to ensure, by securing appropriate weapons to be able to effectively confront and to conquer the health challenge, which made the basis of the forces-alliance by means of partnership.
Concurring to call for the collaboration and the need for the training, the Executive Chairman, Adamawa State Primary Health Care Development Agency (ADSPHCDA), Dr Batulu Isa Ahmed said, the engagement was targeted at sensitising media workers in Adamawa State, with the appropriate information on COVID-19 as well as the proper way of disseminating same to the public without causing panic and/or stigmatisation.
The sensitisation training, Tribune Online can report, was overwhelmed by journalists in and around the state, cut across the entire ‘genres’ of the media: print, online, radio and television.
Some of the participants interviewed revealed to the Periscope reporter that the training was critically timely.
“The training will on the one hand, constructively create a new vista, a new angle of health communication and reportage. It will, on the other hand, update by standardising the existing knowledge in, the coverage of and news report on the field.
“Training and retraining go a long way in improving one’s skills. This one isn’t an exception. We remain grateful to the organisers” the participants would say.
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