The Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) in partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has developed a manual to train journalists on how to report on migration issues.

The two-day workshop, which took place at Aburi in the Eastern Region on Thursday, is geared towards enhancing the work of media practitioners on migration reporting.

The training, according to the President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), Dr. Roland Affail Monney would help the selected media houses to set up migration desks in their newsrooms.

“The programme is basically to draw up guidelines and look at the possibility of establishing migration desks in the selected media houses because migration is such a complex issue which has been subjected to misreporting and there is the need for the media to be so capacitated so that they will lead the way in reporting factually, accurately and reporting in such a manner that addresses the monumental issues migration presents,” he stated.

Speaking to JoyNews on the sidelines of the workshop, one of the facilitators, Dr. Kweku Rockson noted that the complexity of migration demands a comprehensive understanding of the subject by journalists when reporting.

“Migration is a specialised area so it calls for people who have a very good understanding of the matters. What we have done is that we have always been taking very small aspects of it and just blowing it up. For instance, we can have migration issues coming up during elections because of the suspicion on the part of one party or the other having brought in people from neighbouring countries to vote,” Dr. Rockson said.

He added that over the years, reports on migration have been imbalanced.

The workshop brought together, experts in the field of media training and practitioners to develop the document that would help journalists report effectively on migration.