Penplusbytes Partake in Strategic Meeting on Strengthening Media Oversight of the Extractives Sector
Following the successful implementation of the “Strengthening Media Oversight of the Extractive Sectors Pilot Program”, The Revenue Watch Institute will be hosting the International Institute of ICT Journalism (Penplusbytes) and its implementing partner, the Africa Center for Media Excellence (ACME) from Uganda on 14th and 15th January, 2013.
The “Strengthening Media Oversight of the Extractive Sectors Pilot Program” was designed to increase the quality and quantity of oil and gas stories in the selected countries with the ultimate objective of having a knowledgeable and active media which is critical to having an informed and engaged public, civil society and Parliament that can hold government to account.
Kofi Mangesi, Director of Research and Training of Penplusbytes said that “the meeting in Dar es Salaam forms part an ongoing effort to share information, experiences and material from the pilot oil, gas and mining media training program which had been running in Ghana and Uganda since 2010 and key to this meeting is to share our plans to introduce this program in Tanzania as well.”
He added that a greater portion of the meeting will be devoted to reviewing lessons learnt and processing what have been gathered from this training experiment, including reports from the implementing partners in Ghana (www.reportingoilandgas.org) and Uganda (www.acme-ug.org), from the international partner Thomson Reuters Foundation (www.trust.org), and the monitoring and evaluation consultants.
The meeting will also serve as the platform to introduce the training manual/curriculum that has been developed out of the pilot program and a training-of-trainers workshop meant to offer and share ideas for how to apply the curriculum to meet the learning needs of adult professionals. Team Penplusbytes’ trainers will share their insights about the pilot project and make recommendations for better implementation of the subsequent project.
At the end of the delivery of the pilot stage of the project, over 40 journalists were trained from both Ghana and Uganda. These journalists were drawn from print, radio, television and online media. The programme comprised international field trips, writing bursaries, editors’ liaison, workshops and individual writing projects on the extractive sectors.