By Heba Afify
CAIRO: Maat — a civil society organization that has been active in the field of human rights since 2004 — organized a two-day workshop for local media personnel as part of the organization’s second “Citizen’s Voice” campaign, which started Wednesday.
According to Walaa Gad Al-Kareem, Maat’s project manager, the National Democratic Party leaders and some ministries have started to apply a policy of decentralization throughout the last year. The “Citizen’s Voice” campaign therefore aims to prepare the community to cope with this recent tendency towards governmental decentralization.
Al-Kareem said that for a decentralized system to be successful, four entities must be able to coordinate with one another: officials, the local council, civil society and the local media.
“The government only trains the officials to apply decentralization, so we fill the gap by training the other three entities,” Al-Kareem said.
The local media trainees set to attend Maat’s two-day workshop will include journalists in national and local newspapers, website managers, television producers, and television hosts.
Al-Kareem said that the workshop will cover the two primary roles of the media within a decentralized governmental system: to spread public awareness so that everyone may understand how a decentralized government might affect his or her own life, and to report on local problems that arise so that the issues may be brought to the authorities’ attention.
The first “Citizen’s Voice” campaign, which took place in 2009, organized meetings between residents in villages and their local councils. The meetings were designed to create a direct line of communication between the village residents and their local councils so that the villagers would be able to continue voicing their concerns directly to their representatives well into the future.
