The Department of Information is implementing a project aimed at building the capacity of District Information Officers (DIOs) through provision of up to date equipment and training to enable the DIOs meet modern demands of their profession.
The project, District Information Capacity Enhancement (DICEP), is in its first year of implementation and funds permitting, it might run for about 5 years.
Recently, the department organised two training workshops in Central and Southern Regions for both Technicians and DIOs on news and video documentary content production and dissemination as part of the project.
Speaking when officially opening a 4 day training workshop at the school of Civil Aviation in Lilongwe, the Director of Films and Technical Audio Visual Arthur Chipenda said the Ministry of Information will soon be devolved in capacitating DIOs and technicians so that they are ready to be fully used by councils and be able to contribute as well as adding more value to the councils.
Chipenda said the training will make sure that they work as a team and support each other to be able to be doing news, video and audio production with studios in all the country’s regional headquarters of Mzuzu, Lilongwe and Blantyre.
“The ministry promises more trainings and refresher courses to the Technicians and DIOs on production so that in future all districts across the country, should have studios,” he said.
In his remarks, the project’s coordinator at the Department of Information Wallance Chipeta said the first phase of the DICEP project will cover the 3 zones as production centres with the state of the art equipment to be established in the near future and each district shall have a studio.
Chipeta said the project’s funding is in phases in each financial year and this phase will cost Mk200 million of which Mk100 million has been given already.
One of the training participants, a Technician at Rumphi District Information Office, Ishmael Soko said the project will strengthen the relationship between Technicians and DIOs working hand in hand as a team in the production of audio and visual news materials.
According to Soko, Technicians are ready to do more than what they have been doing so far so that together with the DIOs they work hard to improve the services of the Department and the Ministry as a whole.
On her part, DIO for Ntcheu Grace Kapatuka said the project will make the DIOs to do more than just news reporting which is a good thing as they are equipped with skills of video production and photojournalism.
