KLCBT & GIZ support capacity building of local community media

Research by the International Budget Organisation shows that “in global comparisons, South Africa meets the average amount of government expenditure allocated to services like education, health, and housing by similar middle-income countries. Yet South Africa has been the site of thousands of service delivery protests that are the result of growing frustration with the type, quantity, and quality of services received by the country’s poor.”

The crisis of governance in South Africa is not just about poor service delivery, it is also about the failure of meaningful dialogue and communication. How do we change that? By building capacity and supporting local community media to tell both sides of the story with substantiated facts. Using freely available data, e.g. municipal budgets and household surveys, information and stories can be told in more understandable and meaningful ways.

A two-day workshop on data-driven story telling for journalists was held on the 15-16 March 2016 at the MSC Business College in Nelspruit. The provision of training to community journalists from Mpumalanga, in the application of easy-to-use data tools, was aimed at strengthening the capacity of journalists to access, analyse, verify and visualise data to tell relevant community stories. Graeme Addison, the training facilitator, noted:”effective media organisations today must build their capacity to extract news and background information from the abundance of data available in the public domain.”

This workshop is part of a bigger project jointly implemented by GIZ Governance Support Programme, Code for South Africa and the Kruger Lowveld Chamber of Business and Tourism (KLCBT). As part of KLCBT’s business integrity initiative, the chamber has an interest to cooperate stronger with local media and thus increasing access to information for citizens on issues and matters surrounding local governance and integrity.

What can you do? Support your local community media publications and radio stations by reading, listening and interacting. For more information about this project, visit the KLCBT’s integrity website at www.integrity.org.za.