CAPACITY BUILDING

WHAT DOES PIWA DO?

• PIWA works towards strengthening the technical capacity of media professionals and animators (journalists, mainstream media and community radio producers) to inform.
• Strengthen the communication capacity of social movements and civil society organisations, including youths and artists.
• Sharpen the sensitivity and thematic knowledge of traditional and new producers of information on development issues adopted by PIWA as priority themes.
• Use methodologies that capitalize on experience gathered from training sessions PIWA has conducted for over a decade.
• Develop new methodologies in a regional context marked by the emergence of new media (online and social media, and by new stakeholders engaged in social movements, like Y’en a marre, urban artists).
• PIWA organises workshops to improve knowledge on certain issues (environmental governance).

• Training workshops and technical internships

These activities targeting journalists are aimed at improving the latter’s familiarity with, or better still, mastery of journalistic genres that are not very popular in the context of the news companies in which they are employed: in-depth reports, magazines. These workshops are also aimed at helping journalists of traditional media to appropriate several or multimedia.

Destined for civil society organisations- or specific segments therein, like high school students -, as well as the pooling of their tools (collaborative blogs) and synergies in their cooperation actions (campaigns, live tweets).

• Lifelong learning and assistance.

PIWA hopes to ensure that the capacity-building offered to its partners is sustained over a certain period of time. After organising workshops, PIWA systematically sets up follow-up mechanisms, usually based on productions by workshop participants over a certain period of time (from a few weeks to a few months), permitting them to practice what they have learnt from the workshop.

• Coaching and co-productions

PIWA supports cooperation between less advanced media (community radios for example) and more advanced media (mainstream for example); grouping of local radios around more experienced local radios; and between journalists working in different contexts (West African, Maghreb, European).

• Internships in media institutions.

PIWA organises internships for CSOs in media institutions aimed at strengthening their communication capacities (Senegal, Mali).

PIWA supported the strengthening (Radio Oxy-Jeunes), or creation of “School Community Radios” (URPCI).

• Training of trainers.

PIWA hopes to create small skills clusters within important associations and networks (for example, the training of trainers in community management; training of mentors).

• Mentoring.

PIWA offers capacity-building to cohorts of journalists through close monitoring over time via mentoring.

Mentors offer support to groups of journalists over several months. The mentors could be drawn from “desk reporters” working either in the newsrooms where the participating journalists work, or from experienced professional journalists external to the newsroom (teachers, retired editors-in-chief).

PIWA is now working towards establishing partnerships with dynamic and innovative schools of journalism. It also trains mentors, offers training of trainers sessions in “Journalism sensitive to…(gender, conflicts, the environment).

These training sessions are general facilitated by local resource persons: scholars, researchers, as well as activists.

DOCUMENTS AND PEDAGOGIC RESOURCES

PIWA produces:

• Pedagogic manuals [Ex: TO BE COMPLETED]
• Thematic briefings [Ex: TO BE COMPLETED]