President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), Mr. Albert Kwabena Dwumfour, has stated that training journalists to upgrade their skills on social but critical issues, especially road safety, has been a top agenda item of the GJA.
According to him, the GJA is of the belief that Journalists must be abreast with emerging trends to enable them to report with accuracy and certainty.
Mr. Dwumfour said this at a capacity-building workshop for road safety journalists at the Coconut Grove Regency hotel last week.
“It is the reason I see this workshop, which is being organized to build the capacity of journalists on road safety reporting, as very apt. “This undoubtedly would go a long way to support policy change advocacy, amendments, and enforcement of various road traffic regulations to improve safety on the roads and reduce road crashes,” he said.
The workshop was organised by CUTS International, Bloomberg Initiatives for Global Road Safety (BIGRS), and the National Road Safety Authority (NRSA). It sought to build the capacity of journalists to champion advocacy on road safety through their reportage.
Quoting the National Road Safety Authority, Mr. Albert Kwabena Dwumfour said that between January and June 2022, approximately 1,300 people were killed in motor vehicle collisions. Compared to the same time last year, this is a 10.59% drop in the number of people who died on the roads.
Furthermore, 7,997 persons sustained various injuries through road accidents within the same period, a 2.3 percent decrease in the number.
Also, he noted that within the same period, 1,356 pedestrians were knocked down by vehicles, representing a 7.7 percent decrease in the number of cases.
“This means that if we put in more effort as stakeholders, these numbers will further reduce drastically,” Mr Albert Kwabena Dwumfour.
He continued, “That is why workshops like these are so crucial, and as media practitioners, we should up our game to ensure that some preventable causes of road crashes are duly highlighted to attract the needed attention of the authorities concerned.” This is our major role as journalists.
