August 21, 2015 By Ibrahim Tarawallie
With support from Oxfam, the West Africa Democracy Radio (WADR) Wednesday commenced a two-day intensive training for radio journalists on professional production techniques and Ebola sensitive reporting.
The training, at the Hill Valley Hotel in Freetown, brought together participants from WADR’s partner radio stations across the country with the aim of improving techniques of participants as well as reviewing and assessing the impact and quality of work done by radio listening groups over the past months.
Speaking during the opening ceremony, WADR Board Chairman, Batilloi Warritay, stated that the training emanated from an engagement between WADR’s head and Oxfam in 2014 to reflect on how to strategically develop collaboration, as they could lend value to many things that were going on as a result of the Ebola outbreak.
He said out of those discussions came a plan to support and monitor the effective governance of the Ebola epidemic response at regional level through series of coordinated top-down, bottom-up communication activities via radio FM/AM, web and targeted civil society networks in the ECOWAS region.
He expressed hope that at the end of the training participants would get to know so much of how the project will continue to unfold and Oxfam’s clear indication of gaps or challenges that the project has been unable to confront and may need to address.
Mr. Warritay stated that WADR was established by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) in 2005 to be a vehicle for the dissemination of development information across the West Africa sub-region.
Also, National Coordinator in the Office of Government Spokesperson, Abdulai Bayraytay, commended the organisers of the training and expressed hope that participants will put into practice what they would be taught.
Presentation of equipment to WADR’s partner radio stations climaxed the ceremony.