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Success Story

Photo: Internews-Ethiopia/Solomon Teferi

Journalists interview recipients of antiretroviral treatment (ART) during a visit to a local NGO. “Journalists can make a tremendous change in society by informing and educating,” said one participant. “I can upgrade my knowledge and influence others about AIDS.”

Local media can play a significant role in helping Ethiopians cope with the challenge of HIV/AIDS. To be effective, it is important that journalists are correctly informed of facts and issues about the disease and available treatment. In order to help the media become a positive force in addressing HIV/AIDS, USAID, in coordination with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, funded a project to educate local media about the issue and supports their effort to provide more frequent and higher quality reporting and programming on HIV/AIDS.

The project, called Local Voices, aims to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and lessen its impact by training journalists from local newspapers in health-focused reporting and writing. During a five-day practical training course, journalists talk with people living with HIV/AIDS at a local organization that provides care and antiretroviral treatment to the community. Local Voices then arranges for each participant to spend several days one-on-one with a health journalist trainer to finalize stories and plan for future HIV reporting. At the end of the workshop, each trainee has articles ready for publication and plans for future articles.

The project has also held a 10-day training workshop for three radio talk show hosts. They are now including information about HIV/AIDS issues on their radio shows.

“Journalists can make a tremendous change in society by informing and educating,” said one participant. “I can upgrade my knowledge and influence others about AIDS.”

The training helps journalists inform the public with accurate information about HIV/AIDS. Through better reporting and programming, local media were able to reach out to approximately 6 million Ethiopians with information critical to protecting themselves against the virus and to caring for those who are infected and affected by the disease.

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