Resounding turn-up for training

The second quarter citizen journalism training roared into life with record turn-out as more and more women begin to understand the nature of our work and see the essence of exercising their communication rights.
Our two previous training sessions had 17 and 19 participants respectively. This time the number has shot up to 28, surpassing our capacity of 16 participants per session by almost half. The sudden increase in participants has had a strain on the limited resources available for the training.
Thanks to the commitment of members of staff who have sacrificed to work overtime, all the participants have managed to take the first step into the journey of generating their own user friendly content, own and control the media and express their legitimate viewpoints in a language they understand and in formats they can use. This training will enable participants not only to seek, receive and impart, but to listen and being heard, understand, learn, create and respond.
The training borrows from the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Declaration of Principles which calls for the building of a people-centred, inclusive and development oriented Information Society where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and people to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life premised on the purposes and principles of the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
For 21 days, participants in the training will embark on an epic journey and encounter new technologies. They will open their new email accounts, a first time experience for a majority of the women. They will also learn how to tell their own stories and how to post these stories on a blog. The participants will produce a community newsletter that contains stories about them by them.
As we take these women and girls on their journey, there has been a flurry of requests by other women, girls and men who want to take part in the training. The third quarter training is almost fully booked and new dates for the fourth quarter training will be availed before the end of the second quarter.