Media Professionals Get Involved in Reproductive Health

A three-day workshop organised by UNFPA just ended in Johannesburg, South-Africa.

Some 50 media professionals from Southern, East, Central, West and North Africa have discussed the need to reinforce their role in reproductive health reporting in a bid to better explain the relationships between the population, development and individual well-being.

This was during a three-day media advocacy workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa organised by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Regional Offices in South Africa and Senegal. The gathering intended to see how media practitioners can contribute to the 1994 agenda of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) that built on the success of the population, maternal health and family planning as to deliver human rights-based development.

During the workshop, UNFPA experts underscored the importance of the media as the most powerful and cost-effective communication channels available for reaching policy audiences, civil society and the general public. They aimed to show family planning advocates how to increase the quantity and quality of media coverage of family planning and to actively engage journalists in reporting on family planning consistently, factually and responsibly.

Despite some of the constraints presented by journalists such as the lack of interest in family planning news items by certain publishers who will rather prefer to treat it like a brief or bury such a report on the basis that it will not sell the newspaper or generate income, the journalists were made to understand that family planning is newsworthy.

In the broadest sense, it contributes to community and family well-being and its widespread adoption can affect the pace of national development. More directly, it was stressed that family planning contributes to improvement in women's status as it helps avoid unintended pregnancies, reduces pregnancy-related risk and the number of abortions.

UNFPA experts explained that family planning issues affect large numbers of people, entail personal as well as government expenditures for it all depends on the elements that journalists will look into when deciding on the stories to write or broadcast. At the end of the workshop, an action plan was developed to mobilise media professionals beyond the ICPD 2014 agenda and also enhanced partnership on core population issues in the region.