Media urged to focus on social issues

Mr George Osei-Bimpeh, Country Director of SEND-Ghana, a Social Enterprise and Advocacy organization, has urged the media to dedicate space on their platform for social issues instead of focusing principally on political disputes.

He said there are enough potential for social issues, which are often neglected, and that, focusing on social issues will allow the nation to deliberate on issues affecting the country and find better ways of addressing them.

Mr Osei-Bimpeh said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra at a roundtable on media and social accountability, organized by SEND-Ghana and the Social Accountability Media Initiative.

The roundtable brought together Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), media practitioners and government officials to enhance mutual understanding on how to cooperate and communicate better to advance social accountability messages.

The discussion was also to brainstorm on strategies and challenges affecting stakeholders to ensure good governance and social accountability.

Mr Osei-Bimpeh said there was the need for CSOs to inculcate in the media, their programmes to enhance social impact of the coverage.

He was of the view that civil society organizations needed to fund the media to build capacity in doing more follow-up stories to bring the needed impact for national development.

He said SEND-Ghana is implementing a project named: “Making the Budget Work for Ghana” to improve access and quality of services in priority programmes in the health and education sectors.

The project is funded by the World Bank, under the Global Partnership for Social Accountability programme, features thirty poor districts in Ghana to help strengthen accountability and transparency in their budget processes.

Mr Osei-Bimpeh said SEND Ghana has observed that budget planning and execution are sometimes unreliable and with weak monitoring systems that did not provide timely information on impact of expenditure.

Mr Thomas R. Lansner, Project Director, Social Accountability Media Initiative, said one of the promising opportunities to generate greater social accountability was in building public awareness and engagement with civil society.

He said the initiative sought to enhance CSOs skills to raise media practitioners’ awareness of good governance and accountability standards.