One of the world’s child rights organizations, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has taken to another level the fight for the rights of children as it has drilled journalists on child rights reporting.
In it’s effort to fight for children’s rights, UNICEF held a day long workshop for Blantyre Press Club members together with members of the Association for Muslim Journalists on child rights reporting at Mount Sochi Sunbird hotel.
According to UNICEF spokesperson, Rebecca Phwitiko the workshop was aimed at equipping journalists with knowledge of how to come up with child rights articles appropriately and also in a sensitive manner.
Phwitiko said reporting on children matters has got so many challenges and needs some expertise as journalists need to serve the public interest but and at the same time need not to compromising the rights of children.
“UNICEF works across in different sectors supporting the government and part of our work is advocacy for children to improve their lives. So the media is the key part of this process so that they understand issues of child rights such to improve their child rights reporting too.
Overall there is a good coverage children issues but the other key thing is to begin interrogating other processes for example today we had a session on budget where journalists were trained how they can interpret for children some budget key figures.” Said Phwitiko.
She further added that they will keep on engaging journalists in several of their activities to make sure that the knowledge gained from this and other workshops done before is put into practice.
Speaking on behalf of Blantyre Press Club president, Simeon Shumba who is the club’s general Secretary said they are so thankful for the training and said it has come at the right time claiming reporting on issues affecting children needs some professionalism.
“As a club we want to thank UNworkshop organizing such kind of a training and I wanted to ask them to give us more of these trainings so that opportunity should be given to those who had no chance to attend this workshop today.” Said Shumba.
Concurrently, one of the participants, Christy Gomani said he and other journalists has benefited much from the workshop and says there will be a great improvement in as far as child rights reporting is concerned.
