By Tabora Bojang
reporting from Beijing
A three-week seminar on news media for African countries and African Union ended Monday in Southeast China.
Sponsored by the Government of the People’s Republic of China, the programme attracted 37 participants from 15 African countries and was held from October 15 to November 4 at the Zhejiang Normal University.
The 21-day colloquium is expected to enhance greater cooperation between China and Africa in news media development as well as help develop a sophisticated human resource capacity for African media practitioners and enhance participants’ operational capacity, skills and managerial ability.
The African delegation also had the opportunity to closely cooperate and had interesting exchanges with experts involved in China’s news media covering cross-cutting topics and emerging issues of global importance.
“As we return home, hope that we all can take the knowledge and experiences from the seminar to implement in our daily reporting and help advance information flow in Africa,” Laura Harivola, communication officer at the AU, remarked during events closing the ceremony.
She added that the seminar is a demonstration of the Chinese government’s commitment to moving, amid with speed, efforts to realise Africa’s development aspirations.
Jonathan Hindolo, the station manager of Njala University in Sierra Leone, said the program has built the knowledge of African media practitioners in highly specialised areas in journalism, communication, skills development and as well as the discovering of the rich cultural heritage of China.
The vice-rector of Zhejiang Normal University, Zhang Xiaozhen, called on the participants to use the seminar as an opportunity to promote the already existing people-to-people cooperation between China and Africa.
He equally congratulated the participants for successfully completing the seminar and ably representing the various media outlets in Africa.
He said: “I sincerely hope that through this platform we have shared our experiences in news media development which will be carried home, to further cement our strong bilateral ties.”
