Statistics Botswana in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), acting through its Country Office for Botswana, and the OECD – Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century (PARIS21) conducted a three-day training program from 12-14 December 2022, dubbed “Health Data Communications Boot camp”.
The boot camp assembled both public and private media journalists, health statisticians, researchers, communications practitioners, monitoring and evaluation experts from the National Statistical System of Botswana as well as some public relations officials of UN agencies in the country, under one roof to learn how to work together more effectively to increase the use of health data and statistics representation in the media.
Media and public relations professionals were trained on how to find and access reliable data and statistics as well as build an understanding of how to use these.
Correspondingly, statisticians are trained on how to present data and statistics in a way that is usable for the media, understanding what information and what formats are required.
The core objective of the boot camp was to improve collaborations between statisticians and journalists with the view to improving communication and interpretation of health data statistics.
It is particularly vital to communicate effectively on health data so that citizens can make informed decisions at the individual, community, and societal levels.
There is an important link between publicly accessible, easily understandable health data and positive societal responses to public health interventions.
Effective health data communication, therefore, presupposes both statistical literacy among journalists and an open channel of communication between them and national statistical offices (NSOs).
Without statistical literacy and open communication, journalism may be impoverished by a lack of data and evidence, and statistics may be unused, misused, overlooked, or misrepresented.
In an interview, Lillian Mogami designated as Manager of Communications, Documentation, and Dissemination stationed at Statistics Botswana revealed that this was the first time ever that Statistics Botswana conducted a workshop of this nature.
Furthermore, she noted that so far the boot camp is proving to be delivering exactly what they expected it to deliver and more.
“We have seen that journalists are really hungry to learn more about data and they are very excited to self-help and not necessarily wait for Statistics Botswana to give them the data,” she states.
Mogami highlighted that the transition from investigative journalism wave to data journalism is taking place and Statistics Botswana and other relevant authorities are remarkably content to provide platforms that support this transformation.
The media practitioners discovered that there is a whole lot of data available on different open portals that are provided to the public by Statistics Botswana inclusive of the website that comprises of statistical publications on all sectors of the economy.
Mogami added that these open data portals allow journalists and all other users of statistics, “to download data sets, manipulate them and run their own analysis for indicators that they are looking for or their areas of interest including health data which is what we are focusing on in this boot camp,” says.
In conclusion, Mogami emphasized that moving forward, they anticipate fruitful and collaborative relations with the media
