Simon's workshop
on M&S Diary (Sierra Leone), 22/Sep/2006 10:06, 34 days ago
I ran my second NEC workshop yesterday, this time with the district staff. I was trying to find out some of the key constraints and opportunities for communicating to the public here about elections.Some of the issues that came up were women not being allowed out when they're menstruating; young people having no ownership of the things that might otherwise make them involved; local radio stations frequently shutting down because of fuel shortages; NEC being seen as powerless on the one hand and corrupt and all-powerful on the other; and of course, illiteracy.The district staff love to argue these things over, convinced that only one opinion can be right. Guess that’s true with most of us, but things can get quite heated between them! They also love presenting their ideas to the group and there’s always stiff competition for who gets to do that.To fill people in, this is what I’m doing at work: I’m trying to finish off a unit plan for all NEC’s outreach work. Then I’ve got to draw up a procurement schedule against our budget for the UN to pay for the 100s of thousands of materials we’ll be printing, developing, etc. After that, we’ll be fine-tuning our messages, recruiting designers and media agencies, producing the materials and trying to get other organisations – NGOs, radio stations, artists, etc. to contribute their own work to the campaign. That tales me up to the end of October! So you can see things are pretty hectic…