Dept gets K250,000 for media promo

The Department for Community Development, Youth and Religion, TVWAN and Unicef have signed a K250,000 agreement for a television and radio programme.
Titled ‘Wantok TV Show ’the monthly news bulletin will be broadcast on TVWAN’s community channel and NBC for six months as trial.
Department secretary Anna Solomon said: “For years, the staff of the Community Development’s hard work, dedication and awareness have not been given recognition and appreciated.
“Now it can use the 30 minutes of monthly TV and radio shows to inform the public about its policies and project implementation on the ground throughout the country.”
Unicef country representative Olushola Ismail spoke about the power of the media and communication in today’s world.
“The media will have to educate the masses, so that the masses can really understand what the political arm is doing,” he said.
“In Unicef, we do not have any programme, we are called to any country to support any programme of the government. Therefore if what we are seeing is part of the government then we 100 percent support it . . .  to reach those communities, those children, parents so that they can better educate their
children and create a better environment for their children.”
Trend Media’s head of operation, Thomas Taylor Benson, says the agreement is a public-private partnership on how to use the media to get the message across.
“We were very excited. Social development and social responsibility are very important to Digicel (which owns Trend Media and TVWAN) as a whole, it compliments what the Digicel Foundation wants to achieve as well,” Benson said.
“People who are marginalised don’t have a voice, so the media can do that.”
NBC will also be relaying the audio version of the programme through its national radio service.
Solomon said: “When you think about the programmes within the department, you are thinking, children, women, people living with disability and the elderly population.
“They make up a family unit and a lot of times the issues affecting families are not made known.
“We want to get the rest of PNG to know what we are doing. This arrangement is really a six-month trial, like a monthly newsletter except that we are using television and radio.
“This is the first time we’ve tried this, we are probably the only government agency (doing it). We see this as a platform to inform the public of approaches that the government is doing . . . to inform the public on referrals, where they can go for help or also to inform the public of upcoming programmes when we visit their provinces and districts.”