Female journalists in Juba are undergoing a five-day workshop in human resources capacity development for novice female photojournalists this week.
The training is meant to provide sustainable entrepreneurial skills to inspire and document the issues affecting communities and find solutions through photography.
The workshop, implemented by the Kanga African Media Production and Investment Ltd (KAMPI), also aims to build the capacity of female journalists in using their cameras to tell their stories and making women's voices heard in South Sudan.
Speaking during the launch, Moyiga Nduru, the commissioner for the Access to Information Commission, advised the female photojournalists to learn camera work and keep their cameras safe when in the field.
“So you try to learn as much as you can about your tool, which is the camera. Make sure you look after it properly, don’t drop it. They are very expensive. You try to multitask, it is not enough only to be a photojournalist. After shooting a picture, you should be able to edit it,” Motyiga advised.
The workshop also aims to equip the participants with the knowledge and skills to be self-employed.
In his opening remarks during the start of the workshop, Patrick Oyet Charles, President for the Union of Journalists of South Sudan (UJoSS) said, “It is very important for us as journalists to have some basic business skills because we have a lot of news agencies that are run as businesses, for example, Reuters, FSN, AP. Most of these news agencies are run like businesses.”
For his part, Peter Louis, the head of KAMPI, said the training will improve the capacity of female journalists in the country.
“We are trying to do this for our female colleagues not because we are better than them or they are better than us, but we are doing this because we are seeing a gap. Whenever we are going for some occasions, we only see mostly male cameramen and few female camera persons and that is not enough,” he said.
The workshop is organized under the Theme ‘MY LENS, MY VOICE’.
The training is funded by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and implemented by KAMPI through the Human Appeal Associates (HAA).