Kenya Hosts Workshop on Media and Sustainable Development
By Lilian Museka
NAIROBI---A two day international workshop on media and sustainable development in Africa is currently underway in Nairobi.
The workshop is to provide a platform for dialogue, exchange of experiences and learning on ways of strengthening the media’s role in promoting sustainable development in Africa.
The workshop, which has attracted over 50 participants from East, Central and The Horn of Africa regions who include journalists, researchers, academicians, policy makers and environmentalists, will also review the status and trends in development communication in Africa and the role of media in promoting effective development communication in the continent.
Participants will also examine the legal, policy, institutional and capacity challenges facing the media in the effective communication of sustainable development and examine the tools and resources necessary to support media practitioners to effectively communicate sustainable development in Africa.
“Development communication and the role of the media in fostering it are fast moving to the front page of sustainable development discourse. Many newsrooms in the developed world have now set up special desks to deal with environmental reporting and the same trend is evident in developing countries where the level of environmental awareness within newsrooms continues to rise,” said Benson Ochieng, a member of the workshop organizing team.
Speaking in Nairobi ahead of the conference, Ochieng’ said there was need to mainstream and scale up media reporting of scientific information about impacts of climate change on health, ecosystems, national economies and livelihoods given the reality that the human society’s socio-economic and political fabric is inextricably linked to the environment.
He said many of the conflicts bedeviling the African continents were closely linked to competition for access to and ownership of environmental goods and services.
“A case in point was the 2007/8 post-election violence in Kenya, which had as much roots in concerns over access to land and environmental goods and services as in the inherent weaknesses of the electoral system,” he said.
The workshop is organized by the Institute for Law and Environmental Governance (ILEG) and Maseno University, in collaboration with the Kenya Correspondents Association (KCA) and the Kenya Environment and Science Journalists Association (KENSJA) with support from the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and the Ford Foundation.