Peace Ambassadors The Gambia has concluded a three-day training of media practitioners on peace building, conflict management, and social cohesion to enhance their reporting skills on restoration and maintenance of peace and stability.
The theme of the training was: ‘Support young people to promote participation in politics, conflict resolution and decision-making processes’.
In an interview, Babucarr Sambou, President of Peace Ambassadors The Gambia said it is part of their mandate to ensure peace, and that it is important to educate journalists to better understand reporting in hostile zones. He acknowledged that it is sensitive and difficult to manage reporting on conflicts.
He intimated that the project is funded by UNFPA and is geared towards ensuring peace in the sub-region. He went on to emphasise the need for journalists to be trained on how to manage reporting in conflict environments. ‘‘Most of the journalists face challenges in reporting in hostile environments for the fact that they lack the know-how of reporting [in such conditions],” he observed. He therefore noted that it is important for journalists to do security planning and research before they embark on reporting in hostile zones.
Sambou further cautioned journalists to better study and assess environments they are assigned to report, stressing that it is important for them to know what are the possible threats, dangers and the security measures to ensure that they are able to keep themselves safe against any emergency situation.
Fabakary Kalleh, trainer for Peace Ambassadors The Gambia deliberated on the various strategies of conflict resolution, noting that in order to ensure conflict resolution by journalists it is significant for them to better understand the concept of peace and community journalism. He argued that most of the journalists are quick to publish a breaking news but do not evaluate the impact to determine if it is positive or negative.
Kalleh mentioned the need for journalists to understand psychological and communication dimensions of the people they are dealing with in a particular environment; that they should be able to balance and avoid writing in a manner that will fan the conflict.
In order to resolve conflicts, he indicated, there is the need to identify the conflict. This, he said, requires conflict analysis skills, involving actors, tolerance and understanding. “This will ensure the ability to discuss with parties to be balance and not be bias”.
For his part, Momodou Juju Jallow, Programme Manager, Peace Ambassadors The Gambia asserted that people are the conflict and conflict is the people; thus there is need to train journalists, amongst others, on how to manage conflict to enhance their capacity to report more effectively.