By Gbenga Abulude
The New Diplomat‘s South-South Correspondent, covering Akwa Ibom and Cross Rivers States, Mr Akanimo Kufre has been selected for a training course on ‘Malaria Reporting in Africa’ by Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Akanimo is one of the few Nigerians among the 15 African journalists shortlisted for the course.
The course which began on Monday, September 7 and continues till September 25, 2020 entails live training sessions on topics such as critical understanding of Malaria, identifying flaws in scientific reports, understanding of health statistics, tackling fake news, effective promotion on social media and embracing solution based journalism among other course modules.
The training also involves one-on-one session with trainers and two-hour virtual session with experts in the malaria fight.
Kufre, who joined The New Diplomat in 2016, has a study background in Microbiology, and has enriched it with journalism training at the Internal Institute of Journalism where he bagged a Post Graduate Diploma in Journalism.
“His remarkable skill-sets and experience, including the knowledge addition on covering the Covid-19 pandemic have been an asset, coupled with his excellent reportorial of the assigned states,” The New Diplomat‘s management board said while reacting to the news of his selection.
According to Thomson Reuters Foundation, its motivation to train journalists on malaria reporting stems from emerging challenges and evolving technologies to combat the century-old disease, noting that new reporting techniques must be employed to accurately report on diseases.
“Since the turn of the century, the fight against malaria made tremendous progress and global malaria death rates dropped substantially. Developments in disease prevention and treatments have helped to ease the burden of the disease, but obstacles to reducing malaria incidence persist. After decades of improvement, malaria cases are either flat or increasing again, challenging current approaches and interventions. New tools and innovations are being developed and delivered to rise to this challenge.
“In 2018, the WHO estimated there were 228 million cases of malaria worldwide and global deaths tallied at 405,000, with pregnant women and young children most vulnerable to the deadly disease. The WHO African Region represented 93% of cases and 94% of deaths that year,” the Foundation said in its recent report.
Recall this is not the first time that The New Diplomat will be collaborating with the Foundation on in its media intervention programmes in Africa.
In 2019, this newspaper had partnered with the Foundation, headquartered in London, UK alongside the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism (IAJ), Johannesburg, South Africa on an investigative scheme: ‘Reporting Illicit Finance in Africa.’
Through a cross continental collaboration, an investigative series published by The New Diplomat exposed how the trafficking of contraband cigarretes through West Africa’s porous borders; products counterfeiting and the illegal shipping of cigarettes to Nigeria by tobacco multinationals have combined to contribute to Nigeria’s illicit financial flows in recent years, denying government the accruable income and putting smokers in the harm’s way.
The investigative report triggered a wave of reactions in the Nigeria’s tobacco industry and among key regulators, leading to the gazetting of the abandoned National Tobacco Control Act in early February, 2020, barely two weeks after the last report was published. The Act was signed into law in 2015 by former President Goodluck Jonathan following its passage by the National Assembly.
Until the publication of the report, the failure by the Nigerian government to gazette the Act has made the implementation and enforcement of tobacco regulations in the country difficult, making operators in the industry to get away with many cross border infractions.
