Empowered Pens, Stronger Voices: Journalists Pledge Action after Rehabilitation Training
Breaking down Barriers: The CBC Health Services has empowered some 25 journalists drawn from four regions of Cameroon with specialized skills to champion rehabilitation stories in favour of persons with disabilities. The training was held on January 5, 2024, at the CBC Health Services Mvan Resource Center in Yaounde under the auspices of the Rehabilitation Compass for Inclusion (RCI) project piloted by the EDID program.
The workshop aimed at equipping these journalists drawn from the West, Northwest, Southwest, and Center regions to break down Barriers and give a voice of recovery to persons with disabilities.
Opening the workshop on behalf of Prof. Tih, Director of the Health Services, Mr. Awa Jacques Chirac, Coordinator of Services for People with Disabilities (SPD) of the CBC Health Services and main facilitator at the workshop, noted that journalists play a vital role when it comes to rehabilitation, the very reason for which the workshop was organized. The SPD Coordinator used the avenue to introduce the Rehabilitation Compass for Inclusion project under the EDID program. According to him, the project comes when the World Health Organization has just launched the Rehabilitation Agenda 2030, intended to shift rehabilitation from the Civil Society to Governments.
The rehabilitation courses that are being piloted in Cameroon under the RCI project have been supported with funding from the Liliane Foundation and the AFAS Foundation. The media is one of the key stakeholders engaged in ensuring the sustainability of the courses in creating demand generation for people to be trained as Physiotherapists, Community-Based Rehabilitation Workers, Multiskilled Rehabilitation Technicians, and Occupational Therapists.
Mr. Awa Jacques Chirac highlighted that the journalists are expected to lead in raising awareness and demand for rehabilitation services because the CBC Health Services recognizes the role the press has in promoting behavior change communication, by sensitizing and promoting the uptake of services. He further explained that the workshop was organized to bring to their attention the investments the CBC Health Services and Partners have made in developing rehabilitation services; it was his hope that the media men would go out there and change the narratives around disability inclusion, make it trend and more importantly to do that as part of the wider call of Rehabilitation 2030 launched by WHO in 2017. This, to him, will also be their way of supporting the Government through the Ministry of Social Affairs as they are fully involved in the Rehabilitation 2030. “Your efforts will go a long way to increase access, both to trained providers and access to fully developed services,” Mr. Awa told the journalists.
“Hats off to the CBC for working tirelessly to promote Inclusion”. Those are the words of Nathalie Dikoume, Head of the Communication Unit at the Ministry of Social Affairs who noted that she was pleased to have been part of the training for journalists. According to her, this initiative needs PWDs themselves, families, organizations for PWDs, and other organizations working in the community to understand what Community Based Rehabilitation is, and the reasons why the media in their role of sensitization and education was brought in to understand Community Based Rehabilitation.
“This workshop was also aimed at promoting inclusive communication because one of the problems for PWDs is access to information. Usually, the media would treat information without considering this vulnerable group. So, it was important for journalists to understand that they have another audience out of those they consider as ‘normal’; people with hearing impairment, visual impairment, etc… should be considered in the treatment of information,” she reiterated while appreciating the CBC for the initiative.
A Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) worker and beneficiary of this initiative, Mr. Rodrique Ebiloa in response said, networking with journalists will go a long way to help achieve set objectives, especially to promote inclusion in the communities and identify the barriers faced by the children who are really suffering. He emphasized that there is information that hardly reaches the communities but with journalists, they know what needs to be done to ensure that information reaches the target population as well as the leaders and decision-makers. To him, collaboration and networking with journalists is key to reaching out to people who can be of help.
At the close of the day, participants wrote down commitments and promised to put all they learned into use, especially in making the public know more about rehabilitation and available services through sensitization and education to close the gaps that exist in disability inclusion. They took a commitment to suggest story ideas surrounding Rehabilitation and as they go back to their newsrooms, rehabilitation information will be brought to light at all costs.