FasoMedia FM – Bring on the election!

FasoMedia FM – Bring on the election!

As part of the joint venture entered into by 60 radio stations at the beginning of November, 60 reporters are to receive training so that they will be able to cover the presidential and general elections scheduled to be held in Burkina Faso on 29 November.

The first training sessions were held on 16 November, and were attended by 30 radio election correspondents who had been selected by CFI and UNALFA (Burkina Faso's national union of free audiovisual media outlets) to cover the upcoming elections for FasoMedia FM, an 'election special' radio joint venture whose programmes are being broadcast over the airwaves of more than 60 radio stations.
The training sessions for the remaining 30 radio reporters will be held between 19 and 21 November.

The three-day courses are being led by CFI trainers Pierre-Yves Schneider and Jean-Marie Coat, with the assistance of co-trainers Alfred Conségré, Serge Oulon, Soumaila Rabo and Valentine Zoungrana, and involve teaching the budding election correspondents about managing information on voting day, identifying which topics to focus on and broadcasting their reports over the airwaves (whether live or pre-recorded), so that they will be able to provide the closest possible coverage as citizens cast their votes, and explain the context of those votes.

Since the training began, the security-related matters applicable to Election Day have been covered by Commander Evrard Somda, while Lydia Zanga, the General Rapporteur of CODEL (a consortium of civil society organisations for monitoring domestic elections) has explained the duties performed by the election monitors who the correspondents will meet in the polling stations.

This course has also reminded the participants of the democratic objectives, legal obligations and ethical principles needed to ensure proper journalistic coverage of the upcoming days of voting. Louis Modeste Ouadraogo, a representative of the Higher Council of Communications, has been quizzed by the correspondents on the specific rules applicable to covering the voting and publishing the predicted results.

The correspondents will be reporting from 60 different locations spread across the country, and will be linked to a central editorial team of 15 journalists tasked with monitoring their reports and relaying them on the air.
The trainers are therefore also instructing them on how to standardise and format their articles and interviews to best fit with the synergistic nature of the programme. During the training, the technical and editorial resources will be tested so that they can be adapted if necessary.

The election night programme – which will be broadcast on FasoMedia FM from 10.00 pm on 29 November to 8.00 am on 30 November – will form the subject of a work session bringing together all the journalists involved in devising and broadcasting it.

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