Election Reporting in Botswana I

Details

Reporting elections in Botswana is part of a whole workshop series. In 2004 elections will take place in five Southern-African countries: Botwana, Namibia, Malawi, Mozambique and South-Africa. Due to that, the KAS-Mediaprogramme in collaboration with the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa) and the International Journalists’ Association of Southern Africa (IAJA) created a systematic event series on the topic with a hands-on approach.

The workshops started already in 2003 with editors of various media from the respective countries working together in a three day workshop. They compiled and developed a code of conduct for election reporting.

In a second step journalists and reporters from those media houses attended a four day workshop to get familiar with the code, the general necessities of reporting elections and got a close insight into the electoral rules, institutions, political parties and their programs in the respective countries.

In a third step a series of national follow up workshops takes place a few weeks ahead of the elections in the different countries.

During the campaign and the elections the reporting on electoral issues conducted by the participants will be monitored.

In a fourth step the results of the monitoring will be discussed with the reporters as well as with the editors in a joint conference. Another topic will then be the obstacles the participants have experienced during their elections reporting. This will provide deeper insight into the needs of journalists and help all of us to improve.