EAC journalists to acquire reporting skills on regional integration

The training themed; "Reporting on Regional Integration: The EAC Experience" is scheduled to take place from 10 to 16 April 2011 at the Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge in Arusha, Tanzania.

The East African Community (EAC) has initiated the regional integration training programme in collaboration with Germany's Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), formerly GTZ.

The East African Community (EAC) is the intergovernmental organisation of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi with its headquarters in Arusha, while GIZ is a German development cooperation agency that supports the German Government
in achieving its objectives in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development.

Five from each Partner State

Richard Othieno, the EAC head of Department of Corporate Communication and Public Affairs, said the training programme will bring together 25 journalists selected from all the EAC Partner States (five from each) working in newspapers,
magazines, online publications, news agencies, radio and television. "The journalists will undergo a one-week intensive training on regional integration reporting drawing massively from the East African Community experience," he said in a news release on Friday.

The programme aims at enhancing journalists' understanding of the concept of social, economic and political regional integration in general and the history, Organs and Institutions and policies of the EAC in particular thus improving the
quality of reporting on EAC matters within the region.

"The EAC Secretariat definitely has a role in empowering the media in the region so that they report or write about the integration issues from an informed position," Othieno said.

"The programme will enable participants to exchange and share knowledge and experience as well as giving the opportunity for regional networking. We need to create that critical mass of journalists specialising in regional reporting on EAC and this is the first step in that direction" he added.

Expected to lay the foundation for further training

The workshop is expected to lay the foundation for further training and networking activities focusing on regional integration issues in East Africa.

Application for the training programme is now open and deadline is 23 March 2011.

The training will closely follow the recent 4th East African Community-East Africa Business Council Media Summit which was held in Nairobi, Kenya on 14-15 March. At the summit, Juma Mwapachuthe, EAC secretary-general, urged the media and journalists in East Africa to report positively about the 5-state integration to promote its development. Each media house was asked to dedicate space or time for one story about the EAC per week.