February 8, 2016 By Victoria Saffa
An organisation called Media in Cooperation and Transition (MICT), in partnership with Culture Radio, through their ‘Ebola Bye-Bye Project’, Tuesday commenced a four-day training of journalists from the provinces on the dangers of reporting about the Ebola outbreak.
During the opening ceremony at the Culture Radio conference hall at Fort Street in Freetown, MICT also donated office equipment – Lenovo laptops, recorders, thirty-two gigabytes SD card, headphones and Microsoft Lumia mobile phones – to participants.
Executive Director of Culture Radio, Elijah Gegra, explained that the aim of the training was to strengthen journalists to go back to their communities and continue educating the masses about the dangers of the Ebola virus disease.
The outbreak was declared over November last year after killing more than 4,000 people in the country, but claimed at least one victim this January in Kambia district, northern Sierra Leone.
Gegra said MICT is an organisation based in Berlin, Germany, which had been helping countries that are affected by war and diseases, among others.
“The project is to capacitate radio journalists to educate and inform people on the Ebola virus, more especially when the virus has devastated the lives of many Sierra Leoneans,” he said.
MICT’s producer of ‘Bye-Bye Ebola’ programme, Sarah Bomkapre Kamara, described the training as the beginning of providing help to journalists to report on different issues, more especially their Ebola programmes.
She said MICT’s role was to empower journalists in society.
“Let me urge you, participants, to disseminate and share the knowledge you will be getting from this training. Please use the equipment for it intended purpose,” she said.