Catholic Communicators in the AMECEA region have been meeting in Nairobi, Kenya where His Lordship Bishop Charles Kasonde, Chairman for the AMECEA Social Communications challenged them to embrace the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) as a tool to evangelization.
According to Bishop Kasonde, the workshop which was aimed at creating forum for accelerating the building of ICT infrastructures and capacities of AMECEA conferences is crucial as it envisages the empowerment of Catholic Communication coordinators and directors in all the AMECEA Episcopal Conferences and lay Catholic media practitioners and journalists in ICTs skills and synerging.
“It is time to evaluate where we have come from, where we are and how best we can move forward with our primary objective of information dissemination and sharing,” said Bishop Kasonde.
Bishop Kasonde who heads Solwezi Diocese in Zambia also hinted on the need to devise the ICT policy for the AMECEA region which will later trickle down to the member countries.
He said the Catholic Church in AMECEA countries has numerous strategies of social-developmental pastoral activities but due to ineffective ICT system and lack of proper policies guiding the system, the Church has found herself lagging behind in various fields as far as communication is concerned.
“During the 18th AMECEA Plenary held in Lilongwe, Malawi in July, 2014; Bishops of AMECEA resolved to establish ICT policy at the regional level that will trickle down to the conferences and dioceses. The ICT policy would provide some guidelines to all the ICT activities at the Conference level and for the region, and help our officers’ in-charge of communication to design new media strategies in order to promote efforts evangelization,” he said.
The Bishop then urged Catholic communicators and journalists to stand for the truth and report issues fairly.
Participants to the workshop were drawn from the host Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan.
noted