For a one-and-half-hour flight from Accra to Abuja, anxiety gripped me on my first-time travel to one of Africa’s beautiful cities, but at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Nigeria Immigration seized me for about three hours to burst my bubble.

The warrant for my seizure at the airport was a mandatory requirement of an e-landing card, with scores of passengers applying for it from the Nigeria Immigration website powered by very weak Internet connectivity.

For about three hours, I could not make any headway online at the Immigration website and inland from the airport, an experience that deported my anxiety of seeing Abuja.

After resolving that challenge through the intervention of a lady requested to assist passengers apply for the e-landing card, and a few metres away from that section, Anthony, a calm and friendly Immigration Officer who stamped my passport, connected me to hope.

The two encounters with the e-landing card and Officer Anthony presented me with two worlds of migration in Africa, full of uncertainty and quite different from the smooth flight Africa World Airlines offered me.

That stark reality would later play out vividly at Chelsea Hotel, Abuja, where leaders of journalists unions and associations in West Africa met for two days on the topic: ‘Adapting ILO’s Media Toolkit on Forced Labour and Fair Recruitment for ECOWAS Region’.

ILO Media Toolkit

Lack of information to aid appropriate decision-making may affect migrant labour in so many ways, such as I experienced at the airport.

The ILO Media Toolkit on Forced Labour and Fair Recruitment for ECOWAS Region provides a remedy in that respect by empowering the media to address that need.

The media toolkit, drafted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), is in five modules to guide journalists on labour migration reporting.

The modules detail the critical issues surrounding forced labour and fair recruitment; information gathering methods, and storytelling styles and skills.

Indeed, the media toolkit offers a veritable manual for journalists, journalism trainers and students, clearly setting out the content and context required to address labour migration in an informative, educative and impactful manner.

With the incorporation of some recommended amendments, the publication of the ILO Media Toolkit on Forced Labour and Fair Recruitment in ECOWAS Region will be extremely useful in the quest to address such terrible ills of labour migration.

Purpose of workshop

The two-day regional validation workshop was organised by the ILO Regional Office in West Africa, in collaboration with partners like the Federation of African Journalists (FAJ), with the view to exposing the participants to the ILO draft media toolkit.

The intervention by the ILO is founded on the belief that the media plays a “powerful and profound” role in shaping public understanding of migration, recruitment and labour exploitation.

“Your words can amplify the voices of those too often unheard and can shine a light into the darkest corners of the labour market,” says Dr Venessa Phala, Country Director of the ILO Office for Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Speaking through a representative, the ILO Country Director notes that forced labour and unfair recruitment practices do not only violate fundamental labour and human rights; “they strip people of their dignity, protection and opportunity for decent work”.

“Yet, these abuses continue to persist, often hidden in plain sight,” she adds.

According to Dr Phala, the ILO Media Toolkit on Forced Labour and Fair Recruitment for ECOWAS Region provides a practical resource to help the media uncover the realities of forced labour and unfair recruitment with accuracy, sensitivity and impact.

The Federation of African Journalists is driving the ILO agenda on forced labour and fair recruitment reporting because it believes labour migration is a subject of public interest journalism.

“These are stories that matter to communities, families and the future of our continent. They are about people leaving their homes not out of choice, but out of necessity,” FAJ President, Omar Faruk Osman, points out.

Having established the imperatives for labour migration reporting, the FAJ President charges his fraternity: “We want to see African journalists at the heart of this narrative. It is time we shaped Africa’s labour migration story from our own perspectives so that our experiences are not misrepresented or misunderstood”.

Another major partners of ILO – the Ghanaian European Centre for Jobs Migration, a project under the German development agency, GIZ – is excited about contributing to shaping narratives for regular migration.

Dr Lilian Amankwa Fobi Ashia, Technical Advisor at the Centre, says her organisation is “committed to ensuring regular, orderly and safe migration, and believes in providing accurate information for potential migrants to make informed decision about migration in a regular form”.

As a journalist, journalism trainer and human rights activist, the ILO initiative will greatly help journalists better inform people to navigate the challenges of labour migration, just as the availability of information helped me to secure e-exit card before arriving at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport for a smooth check-in and flight back to Accra.

The writer is the General Secretary of the Ghana Journalists Association and Communication Lecturer at Wisconsin International University College / Email: kofiyebo@yahoo.com