Citizen Journalism training in Uganda ends today

The Citizen journalism in Africa (CJA) training of trainers conducted in Kampala Uganda from 22nd – 26th September 2008 ended today.

The training has been an eye opener to me as it has introduced me to the concepts of Citizen Journalism and equipped me with journalistic, blogging and web 2.0 skills. The training also introduced me to ethics and regulations of citizen journalism, laws of practicing journalism in Uganda, digital photography and introduction to audio among others.

This is indeed a great opportunity to share information that would otherwise be ignored by mainstream media with the rest of the world. Citizen journalism allows us to write stories of events and happenings in our communities and use various outlets to reach our audiences.

The CJA project is a three-year initiative funded by both Hivos and the EU. The aim of the training is to build capacity of civil society organisations (CSO) to use online and offline platforms as a means of publication, lobbying, networking and knowledge sharing with their constituencies.

The project targets six countries namely South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania. In each country two country focal points are acting as country hubs, working with 15 local organisations.  The focus of interaction with local organisations is knowledge sharing, learning journalism skills, media, publication skills and information dissemination.

In Uganda the training is coordinated by the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) and Busoga Rural Open Source Development Initiative (BROSDI) both headquartered in Kampala.