Enhancing Nigeria’s Response to HIV and Aids (ENR) is the BBC World Service Trust’s new Pan-Nigerian, DFID-funded project which will focus on lowering the prevalence of HIV in the country.
An aspect of this is to help capacity building at national and state TV stations. This involves creating a TV training team which will then go out and provide training at local stations, including training on HIV reporting and co-producing with the station for several weeks.
Ambika Samarthya, an international trainer based in Abuja reports on the first stages of the three year project.
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In the last few months, the ENR TV training team has quickly become invested in the project. But, just as in any relationship, the more you put on the line, the quicker you are to get emotional.
I realised this when the team and I went to Nassarawa state to observe a focus group put together by the BBC WST Research team to gather feedback on our television pilot templates. The audience reacted enthusiastically to the programmes, and appeared to learn a lot as well as enjoy the shows. I was particularly flattered because they compared Swagger to Wetin Dey, a hugely popular WST Nigeria production dealing with issues of HIV and AIDS.
However Nasiru (one of the trainers) did not seem as thrilled with the feedback as I was.
