By Mutayoba Arbogast
The Secretariat of the Southern African Development Community(SADC), on October 14, 2022, convened a meeting for at least 115 participants of media intermediaries to enhance communication, visibility, and awareness of SADC.
Ms. Barbara Lopi, Head of Communications and Public Relations at the SADC secretariat, said the meeting aimed to engage and share ideas and information on how to strengthen information dissemination and awareness to ensure that every citizen and stakeholders in SADC member states are aware of the community, its mandate, roles, responsibility, and impact.
“The vision of SADC is one of the economic features, a feature within a community to ensure economic wellbeing, improving standards of living, quality of life and social justice, peace and security for the people in our region,” said Lopi.
In her speech, Ms. Nelao Haimbodi, Communication officer-internal, mentioned the SADC Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan(RISDP) 2020-2023, which ensures broader citizen participation through media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. She noted that more has to be done for media engagement in developing SADC Communication, visibility, and awareness.
The participants discussed measures to establish good relationships, cooperation, and information sharing to enhance communication, visibility, and awareness.
Assah Mwambene, President of the Public Relations Society of Tanzania(PRST), and Alec Lushaba, Managing editor Eswatini Financial Times, on behalf of the participants, after discussing their presentations, suggested the formation of a Public Relations and communications officers forum within SADC to meet physically rotating from one country to another to articulate issues about visibility and further professionalism.
They said that SADC needs to engage with embassies so that they articulate and promote its history and activities by sharing issues of carrying forward the agenda and that SADC must invest in training pen pushers and media houses to collect, process, and disseminate information with professionalism.
The secretariat will pass through the recommendations to see which falls under their capacities according to the financial situation.
Sixteen member states that make up SADC are Angola, Botswana, Union of Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC), Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, and South Africa.
Other states are Malawi, Mauritius, the United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, and Seychelles.
