By: AMAWU Cletus Albert Amawu.
The USAID partners with key stakeholders, drawn from over 4 States of the federation and converged on Calabar, the Cross River State capital for a one-day stakeholder’s forum on SCALE project, with the theme: Building Media Literacy against Misinformation, Disinformation, and Mal-Information.
The Strengthening Civic Advocacy and Local Engagement (SCALE) project is USAID funded to partner with indigenous and relevant stakeholders to strengthen the managerial, technical and advocacy capacities of Civil Society Organizations and Business Membership Organizations (CSOs/BMOs) to create a more accountable, transparent, peaceful, and democratic Nigeria with more effective and efficient public service delivery.
The Calabar forum brought together media professionals, educators, and stakeholders to collaboratively develop a comprehensive media literacy module focused on combating misinformation, disinformation, and mal information; with a view to identifying the key challenges and trends in misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, and to collaboratively design a media literacy module that will promotes critical thinking, fact-checking, responsive and responsible information consumption. Integrate interactive and engaging activities to enhance participants’ media literacy skills and foster partnerships and networks among media professionals, educators, and stakeholders to support the implementation of media literacy initiatives to combat misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.
According to Abdulsalam Badamasi, the Policy and Governance Reforms Advisor said,
“The skill project is an USAID funded project for 5 years and it’s meant to be a capacity building to offer Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and Business Membership Organisations (BMOs) in the country capacity building and so far
we’ve been doing this since 2020, and what we realised is that, there lots of misinformation, disinformation and mal-information that is happening in the country, and especially in the run up to 2023 elections and we felt that is important to bring in journalists, communications professionals and other key players together to discuss and tackle these issue, because its threatening our socio cohesion as a nation and can bring about a catastrophic danger beyond imagination if not checked.
“What we’re doing is the component 3 skills advocacy project to open up civic space in the country and what we hope to achieve is to see how we can get journalists, other professionals and especially the CSOs and BMOs to be able to understand different tactics and skills of identifying misinformation, disinformation and to proffer solutions on how to cub the menace and combat it head on for society good,” he said.
A participant of the training, Mr. Amaechi Kelechi Johnson, a member of the Civil Space Watch Cluster, Port Harcourt, River State, said, such a training has become necessary hence, misinformation and disinformation create disunity and destabilization.
“The consequences of misinformation and disinformation creates disunity, destabilization of the society. Basically, the essence of the skill project is to help facilitate the process of countering misinformation and disinformation in the society and to also go back to my constituency, the civil society and including the media to see how as an organisation, we can steep down this training and empower media practitioners and including bloggers to counter misinformation and disinformation in Nigeria,” he concluded.
The training had participants from Lagos, Rivers, Kaduna, Cross River and the FCT, Abuja.
