Communicating Labour Rights: A training course for African media professionals at ITC-ILO

African media professionals are trained on how best to use International Labour Standards and the work of the ILO supervisory bodies to increasingly report and raise public awareness of human and labour rights and their relevance to social development issues.

Background:

  • The frequency of labour-related headlines in the African media is evidence that the world of work is newsworthy. However, due to budgetary and organizational constraints, many news organizations lack labour and/or business specialists among their staff correspondents, and many media workers have had little opportunity to acquire in-depth knowledge of rights at work and related labour issues.
  • To bridge this gap, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its International Training Centre (ITC-ILO) offer training to highlight the relevance of international labour standards (ILS) to accurate and responsible media reporting.
  • The training seeks to equip journalists to handle labour issues in an effective way, broadening their news agendas, improving their reporting and analysis and its relevance to readers, viewers and listeners.

Objectives:

  • To understand how International Labour Standards (ILS) are elaborated, how they are applied and supervised and how ILO works in Africa
  • To determine how information on the ILS system can be referred to in their coverage of labour and social affairs
  • To use ILO databases and documents to research and/or strengthen stories on labour and social issues.

Participants:

Some 25 journalists, correspondents, reporters, editors and publishers, working in all types of media (print, radio, television and the Internet) in Africa are attending the 2013 class. Courses – a combination of online and face to face connections - are interactive and delivered in both English and French.