She She Anchor Lady To Attend IAC Media Workshop in Addis Ababa
Friday 16th November 2007

Ms Sarata Jabbi-Dibba, The Point’s She She columnist, leaves today for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to attend a media workshop oh harmful traditional practice as gender-based violence.

The Inter –Africa Committee (IAC) on traditional practices will be organizing the same workshop in Dakar, Senegal, for French-speaking journalists.

The common agenda for the 3-year plan of action (2007-2009) for IAC, according to our columnist, clearly state that engaging the media is one effective strategy to raising awareness of harmful practices and subsequently of elimination of these practices.

“The media reaches a wider segment of the population powerful and lasting effect whether in the form of serious programs, articles or serious –comic features such as cartoons and side- commentaries. The media has the advantage of immediate and simultaneous reach through electronic or print medium,” she said.

Therefore involving the media professionals in the campaign to eliminate harmful traditional practices, according to her, will speed up achieving our goal of reaching zero tolerance to FGM and other harmful practices.

She said the general objective of the workshop is to eliminate FGM and other harmful traditional practices (HTPS) and the specific objectives are: to sensitize and train  20 media personnel from English –countries on the knowledge of HTPS including FGM and child marriage to  involve modern media professionals in awareness and education campaigns on the elimination of HTPs, to enable  participants develop a communication matrix that would guide them to think through  a communication intervention for behaviour change persuasive communication), to identify the campaign methods that would interest the various targets audiences of media professions, to engage the media to give more visibility  to February 6th as the International Day on zero tolerance to FGM and to establish a network of media professionals on Harmful Traditional Practices (HTP).

The workshop, she added, will be highly interactive and would include paper presentation at plenary sessions and group work. There would also be information sharing by the media professionals who would have come with prepared information on how each media persons would handle the different topics and for what target groups. Finally each participant would draw up a one- year work plan to be followed up by IAC National communities. IAC would distribute evaluation forms to get feed back from participants, and each participant and each participant would receive a certificate of participation.

Expected Outcome

1. Media professionals would be able to contribute to the campaigns on elimination of FGM and other HTPS in a more persuasive way as to set the target audience thinking of behaviour change

2.Media input in the campaigns to eliminate HTPs would have the impact of a reduction in the incidence of FGM, child marriage and other within a year.

Follow Up

1. IAC would device the monitoring, mechanism of: 1 media coverage (to what extent are issues covered by the media TV, radio and print?)

2. Reduction ion incidence of FGM child marriage in the next one year.