Zambia’s growing community media sector, which boasts 60 radio stations and 6 print entities, is regarded as an important tool for community and grassroots development. These media outlets are responsive to their audiences and have established themselves as frontline sources of information and platforms of communication for the communities in their coverage areas.
 
However, community media journalists are increasingly subject to incidents of intimidation and harassment and there have also been arrests and domestic censorship of some online newspapers. Most of these journalists only have a poor appreciation of Zambia’s media laws and the existing threats in journalism.
 
ZaCoMeF therefore intends to organize a training workshop for journalists to promote safety standards and increase their understanding of the legal media environment so that they can best protect themselves. The proposed training will use UNESCO’s “Model Curricula for Journalism Education: A Compendium of New Syllabi”, which incorporates a module on safety and journalism. Under this module, the workshop content will be drawn from “Unit1” - Rights and legal context as well as from “Unit 3”- Threats against journalists.