Benin hosts Penplusbytes’ Communication Design Workshop

Thirty (30) West African Newspaper and Magazine Designers from both Francophone and Anglophone speaking West African countries are meeting at the Universite d'Abomey Calavi, Campus Numerique Francophone de Cotonou in Benin for the 2nd West African Communication Design Workshop.

Opening the workshop, Guy Constant Ehoumi, deputy president of Union des Professionnels des Medias du Benin - UPMB (Journalists Union of Benin) said they are pleased to welcome participants from West African countries to Contonou for the workshop and asked the participants to take advantage of this unique training opportunity to learn more about how to improve the design and layout of their various publications.

The workshop which runs from 6th to 10th April 2009, focuses on visual theory, design as a profession, working on publications in a newsroom and designing for different audiences. This short course also engages already existing knowledge about what constitutes good newspaper/magazine. In addition to the main course, a group of participants are taking a Training of Trainers (TOT) course in design communications.

Speaking on the objectives of the course, the president of Penplusbytes, Kwami Ahiabenu II, said "unfortunately most training programmes for the media turn to forget the role of design in the media and we have come out with this workshop to provide capacity building for design communicators and graphic design in West Africa thereby filling a major training gap."

Participants to the workshop are drawn from the following West Africa countries including: Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Cote D'Ivoire and The Gambia.

Two key experts in design communications namely; Shalen Gajadhar of Rhodes University, South Africa and Nahmsath Yabouri, an Open Source expert based in Togo are the key facilitators for this course.

The second workshop training course on Design Communication 2009 is jointly organized by The International Institute for ICT Journalism www.penplusbytes.org, Highway Africa, Digital Media Foundation in partnership and with funding from Open Society Initiative of West Africa (OSIWA), www.osiwa.org.

http://news.myjoyonline.com/international/200904/28537.asp

Computer Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) to be Reviewed

The Ghana Education Service (GES) has reviewed the Computerized School Selection and Placement system (CSSPS) to enable more qualified candidates to gain admission to Senior High Schools according to Ghanaian Times. The review was necessitated by the fact that every year, since its inception in 2004, about 20 per cent of candidates with good scores are not able to get placement. Mr. Samuel Bannerman-Mensah, Director General of the GES, speaking at a media briefing in Accra on Friday, said the CSSPS has been confronted with many challenges in its five years of operation.

He said most of the problems were human-related since some parents repeatedly selected the same school in the options given them with the perception that their wards would get that particular school, no matter their performances.

Mr. Bannerman-Mensah said other candidates refused to select schools in their communities thereby placing undue stress on schools with limited boarding facilities, while others placed their priorities on particular schools that did not have place for them as a result of the high competition in the aggregates scored.

He said to address the challenges, schools had been categorized according to availability of facilities, geographical location, subjects offered and vacancies available to allow candidates spread their choices so as to increase their chances of being placed.

He said the schools had been put into six categories of Public Senior High Schools in 'A,' to 'D', Public Technical/Vocational, Institutions under category 'T' and Private Senior High Schools and Technical Vocational Institutes in category 'P'.

Mr. Bannerman-Mensah explained that every candidate was expected to choose a total of six schools, stressing that candidates would be allowed to choose only one school from category 'A' and a maximum of two schools from category 'B'.

He said if a candidate made five choices from categories 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D' and 'T' the sixth school must be either from category 'C' or 'D', 'T' or 'P'.

"A person who desires to pursue purely Technical courses may select all six choices from category 'P'. The same also goes for candidates who desire to pursue courses in private senior high schools.

Mr. Bannerman-Mensah said as a result of the development, the Basic Entrance Certificate Examination registration has been decoupled, explaining that it would give the candidate another opportunity to re-select their schools and programmes between April 4 to 8 before their examinations while the registration for the BECE would now take place in September/October.

Previously the registration and the school selection were done at the same time.

EPA: Draft document on co-location of telecom masts ready

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and its collaborators have completed a draft document seeking legally binding modalities for telecom operators to undertake co-location exercises according to GNA

The 26-page draft document made available to the Ghana News Agency is entitled "Guidelines for the Installation and Operation of Communication Mast in Ghana". It is designed to inject sanity into the mounting of telecom masts and antennas in the face of the rapidly growing telecom industry. The document noted that from the late 1990s till date, the telecom industry, particularly mobile telecom, has seen rapid growth leading to the littering of residential areas and the countryside with telecom masts with its attendant aesthetic and public safety concerns. "In some instances, masts are installed without compliance with existing regulatory requirements; unfortunately no other structured tower and antenna support structures has been developed to specifically regulate the location and construction of masts," it said. Co-location allows more than one telecom operator to mount their equipment at a common cell site and serve their subscribers. Mr Ebenezer K. Appiah-Sampong, Director of Environmental Assessment and Auditor of the EPA, told the Ghana News Agency that in the face of challenges posed by littering of masts, co-location was the best alternative option to salvage the situation.

He said even though the telecom operators were fully aware that co-location was a sure way to create a win-win situation for all the stakeholders in the industry including subscribers, regulators and the operators themselves, they had only been paying lip service to it for years now because there was no law enjoining them to undertake co-location. "The telecom operators are quick to blame the permit agencies like EPA for the poor quality service. Meanwhile they have not been able to take a single action on co-location since they started discussions on it years now," he said.

Mr. Appiah-Sampong said one of the cardinal purposes of the guidelines would also be to ensure that the National Communications Authority (NCA), made it a licensing requirement for operators to undertake co-location, adding that it should be possible for the NCA itself to mount masts at strategic positions for the purposes of co-location. Operators who spoke with the GNA admitted that even though they had agreed on hundreds of cell sites for co-location, they had not been able to take action on even one, for reasons not yet clear. The Chief Executive Office of MTN, Brett Goschen, said the market leader had submitted a list of all its current and future cell sites to other operators but their competitors had not done same adding that co-location would save the operators money. Meanwhile aggregately, operators have made thousands of separate requests to the permit agencies, including the EPA, District, Municipal and Metropolitan Assemblies, the Ghana National Fire Service and Ghana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) for permits to mount their own cell sites within residential areas.

The GNA has a long list of complaints made to the EPA by residents of communities where cell sites have been mounted. The complaints include mounting of cell sites without the consent of residents; congestion of masts in particular communities; masts close to people's homes; radiation; fumes and noise from generators causing health problems; schools losing pupils whose parents are concerned about nearby masts.

Mr Appiah-Sampong said the myriad of complaints the EPA received and attended to on daily basis was enough to ensure that the telecom companies were made legally enjoined to undertake co-location. On delays in the issuance of permits, Mr Appiah-Sampong noted that several of the requests presented to the EPA for permits were incomplete, saying that an operator needed to show proof of consultation with residents of the community within which it sought to mount a mast, but in most of the cases there was no such proof. "We have asked most of the operators to take the necessary steps to complete their requests but they have not. There are others who have completed the process and we have asked them to come and pay for the permit to be issued but they have not done so for months now," he said. Mr Appiah-Sampong said some operators mounted cell sites without the requisite permits and some had had to bring their masts down of that reason.

"There are currently several telecom masts which have been mounted and are functioning without the requisite permits and the EPA keeps receiving and attending to complaints about those." Mr Appiah-Sampong said the EPA, together with the other permit agencies, the regulator and the operators themselves, was designing a public education programme to disabuse the minds of citizens about the fear of radiation and other concerns about telecom masts. "But it is our opinion that the operators should have led the way for the permit agencies and the regulators to support but they keep putting huge money into other ventures to promote their brands instead of educating the public to correct the wrong perceptions about telecom masts," he said.