Group tasks CSOs on strengthening advocacy with accurate data

Media Awareness and Justice Initiative, a Non-Governmental Organization, has advised other Civil Society Organizations, CSOs to empower themselves with adequate data before embarking on advocacies or campaigns.

The Coordinator of the group, Onyekachi Okoro gave the advice during a workshop tagged, “Inception Meeting and Data Training for Environmental Reporting and Advocacy” held in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State capital over the weekend.

Okoro decried the narrative style of reporting especially, on environmental issues by CSOs saying that the International Oil Companies and other stakeholders engendering pollution have taken advantage of such gaps to dismiss burning issues that need to be addressed, expressing worry that the oil companies now described such reports as mere narrations.

He urged the CSOs to equip themselves with requisite data on environmental issues such as quality of air and temperature to ascertain the level of pollution in the targeted areas and confront the IOCs with the data so that their advocacies would not be invalidated.

His words, “Over the years, communities and key stakeholders have based their advocacies on narrative style reporting without any number attached to it and in most cases these narrative styles can be dismissed either by local authorities or oil companies and we feel that these lack of empirical data have done advocacies no good.

On his part, Ikechukwu Ahaka, speaking on ” Data, Knowledge and Action,” said the possession of adequate and real-time data boosts the confidence and morale of a CSO to face the audience or stakeholders.

Harping on the importance of data in advocacies, Ahaka said, gone are the days when people in the Niger Delta region used violent protest to press their demands and urged them to be intentional in their advocacies.