Some staff of Damongo based community radio station, Peace and Development ( Padfm 95.1mhz ) have honored an invitation extended to the radio station for a one day training in digital misinformation literacy.
The one day facts checking training was held in Tamale on Monday, 19th December, 2022 with participants drawn from some selected media organizations from the Northern and Savannah regions.
In an interview with this reporter, Mr. Rabiu Alhassan, the managing editor for Ghanafacts, a project of factspace west Africa, an INFC fact checking organization said, the workshop was meant to bring together journalist from the Northern and Savannah regions to help build their capacity interms of misinformation literacy in other to contribute to their efforts to deal with not only health misinformation but misinformation relating to politics, governance among others.
He added that, the selected media organizations from the two regions are expected to join a network called the Ghana facts checking network where the will be pooling their resources together.
According to him, the network is made up of more than one hundred journalist spread across with about thirty ( 30 ) media organisations.
Mr. Rabiu indicated that, the will be pooling their resources by helping to do social listening both online and offline, alerting each other on viral claims and together help debunk the claims and cross publish them on their platforms and that of the media organizations that are on the network and will also cut across platforms including radio, TV, prints among others in multiple local languages to ensure the increase the reach of the work the do in other to ensure that people don’t fall for misinformation.
The workshop forms part of efforts to boost the work of the National COVID-19 Misinformation Task Force, UNICEF Ghana/FactSpace West Africa following recent research study to understand how misinformation spreads among journalists in Ghana led by their partners including the Ghana Health Service, UNICEF and FactSpace West Africa to help equip journalists in the fight against fake news and vaccine hesitancy in their respective regions.
Padfm’s team was made up of Kumatey Gorden, Gogu Edwin, Yakubu Ramatu and Yahaya Nimatu.
Source: Padfm.com.gh/Kumatey Gorden/0243531604
