BOCONGO HOSTS MEDIA PRACTITIONERS
Botswana Council of Non-Governmental Organizations (BOCONGO) hosted an advocacy and publicity session on vaccine justice and pandemic preparedness with Media Practitioners following the Civil Society dialogue on the post covid-19 preparedness to future pandemics. The purpose of this session was to jointly curate plans that can give the issues of vaccine justice and pandemic preparedness maximum publicity in response to the insights by Civil Society Organizations dialogue.
With the advent of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and other non-state actors suffered severe service delivery setbacks.
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced new and unusual complications. Most troubling is the weakening of CSOs organizational capacity and financial viability and the increasingly constrained legal environment for full operations. Regrettably staff turnover was and is still high in most civil society organizations due to already low funding streams before and after the pandemic and owing to the upper middle-income status of Botswana which drifted donor funding priorities away from partnership with non-state actors and CSOs.
BOCONGO facilitated a Civil
Society context analysis of the immediate and medium-term impacts caused by public and non-state service delivery systems.
The meeting noted among other things gaps in national preparedness to meaningfully respond to future pandemics, which CSOs highlighted that vaccines (covid-19) should be treated as public goods available to all segments of the society including minority groups and persons living with disabilities rather than a marketplace commodity. In addition, Civil Society Organizations present at the convening stated that Botswana should coordinate its national response mechanisms to future pandemics outbreaks with regional partners instead of working in silos. The discussion highlighted that vaccines should be affordable and accessible without discrimination, by giving more prominence to persons living in poverty, LGBTQI+ community, persons living with disabilities, migrants etc.
CSOs augmented the importance of Media Houses using their position and influence to curb misinformation that continues to hinder enlistment of citizens in national vaccine programs or any future pandemics.
To secure traction of CSOs into a more robust and agile sector, resilient to deal with future pandemics, CSOs are geared to overhaul partnership building by re-modelling horizontal and vertical linkages between development partners and CSOs to systematize sharing of development resources; accelerate digital transformation, leverage on domestic funding sources; strengthening advocacy and building the sector solidarity. Media practitioners acknowledged the work of CSOs and highlighted the challenges they experienced in curbing misinformation during the pandemic especially with international news that Batswana were relying on. The rise of social media/ digitalization has been a challenge in misinformation at the same time COVID-19 was a new virus that no one knew of, what to do and how to approach it, therefore, people were consuming whatever they found relatable or helpful to them.
On the other hand, the applaud the Government since every Motswana was given priority to get vaccinated, they augmented. One of the detrimental factors to media practitioners was personal/religious beliefs regarding vaccines since some practitioners drove the narrative on their personal/religious believes.
In conclusion, Media Practitioners in attendance corresponded to strengthening, and resuscitating the partnership with Civil Society Organizations to push the agenda and role educating Batswana on civic matters.