The Edo State Human Capital Development Programme (HCD) on Friday sought the cooperation of journalists in the state on adequate coverage of the three thematic areas of the HCD in a bid to enable beneficiaries understand the benefits inherent in the programme.
The HCD Programme is a project of the National Economic Council (NEC), in association with its Core Working Groups working on three thematic areas of Health and Nutrition, Education and Labour Force Participation.
The Regional Consultant, South-South HCD, Mr OluSoji Adeniyi, made the appeal at a two-day Media Engagement and HCD reporting for media agencies held in Benin City.
Speaking on the topic, “Accelerating HCD base in Nigeria”0, Adeniyi said the three thematic areas of HCD were poorly reported adding that, stakeholders and communities were not aware of the benefits of the programme.
He noted that the media needed to say more about what government was doing through the HCD to enable communities to become aware of the benefits of education and other thematic areas of the programme.
According to him, “The training is to build the capacity of media agencies and also to introduce the components of HCD to journalists to avoid misconceptions.
“The essence of the workshop is to let you know that HCD is a life cycle of a child effect which begins from the womb, the health of the mother, breastfeeding, nurturing of the child and the educational status of that child.
“It involves the opportunity for the child to become employable through the skills that they would have gotten.
“During the period they were exposed to adolescence; to young adults, who would contribute to the labour force of the country.
“So the media need to engage the communities to let them know that a child that is wandering around during school hours, is a child that is likely to drop out of school and need to be corrected and taken back to school.
“We want people to understand that a child that is going to be fully developed to contribute to the economy of the nation starts from when the child is in the mother’s womb.
“Till the child is given birth to in a facility that has the right kind of birth attendant so that we do not lose the child and mother to infant and maternal mortality,” he said.
“We are in Edo where bronze casting has become obsolete and the media need to educate the people on the need to revive it because it has put Edo on the world map,” he added.
He also called on the various focal persons of HCD and other information managers to see journalists as progressive partners adding that, keeping information about HCD and other government projects away from them amounted to doing more harm than good.
Adeniyi, however, disclosed that a total of 260 journalists have so far been trained in the south-south region on HCD programme.
Also speaking, the Edo HCD Focal Person and Managing Director, Edo Skills Development Agency, (Edojobs), Mrs Violet Obiokoro, said that Governor Godwin Obaseki had invested in HCD and was working with the three thematic areas of health and nutrition, education and labour force
Obiokoro, however, lamented that all of the improvements recorded so far by the governor in the state in the thematic areas have been underreported.
“The governor has done a lot in these areas but they are under-reported and as a result, people are not aware of what government is doing,” Obiokoro said.
According to her, “I want to appeal to you all to begin to look into these areas and help us report what government is doing.
“It is about time we begin to report these activities and collect data by ourselves instead of waiting for people to report and collect data for us.
A plenary was held with HCD thematic Focal Persons from the Ministry of Health, Education and Edojobs to discuss the impact of HCD thematic areas in the State.
. TheWitness
