Mr Kojo Impraim, a Research and Development Consultant, has warned media practitioners not to be complacent in the discharge of their duties when reporting on sensitive issues, especially those that are related to conflicts in all forms.

He said the media played crucial roles in the molding, shaping, directing and redirecting public opinions to allow the citizenry make informed decisions and redirect their energies.

Mr Impraim was addressing media practitioners in Kumasi at a day’s workshop to school some selected journalists drawn from all the regions in the country on peace and governance.

The workshop was funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), under its Ghana Peace and Governance Joint Assessment Programme and organised in partnership with the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) and the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA).

The initiative is to further promote dialogue and build consensus on national policy response to systemic governance issues to build consensus and strengthen partnerships with civil society organisations, media, government and the private sector towards developing pragmatic and workable interventions to deal with critical issues to promote peace and good governance in Ghana.

Organisations such as the National Peace Council, National Development Planning Commission, Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, Office of the Senior Minister, YES Ghana among others are part of the partnership.

The consultative platform seeks to promote dialogue and build consensus on critical national issues, including; implementing set of integrated activities that aim at building consensus towards developing pragmatic interventions to dealing with political vigilantism, electoral violence and other development challenges confronting Ghana.

The participants were given some orientation on conflict-sensitive reporting and peace-building.

This is expected to help them adopt conflict-sensitive approaches to media publications in order to contribute towards sustainable peace in Ghana.

Mrs Melody Azinim, Peace and Governance Analyst at the UNDP, said the programme was to ignite grassroots interest in sustaining the peace in the country through the multi-stakeholder approach in strong partnership with the media as the voice of the people.

Mr Albert Yelyang, National Network Coordinator at the West Africa Network for Peace (WANEP-Ghana), facilitating the training urged journalists to avoid sensationalism in reporting on conflict-sensitive issues and ensure that their reports were not conflict igniting.

He said responsible journalism looked at community safety, security and peace and called on beneficiaries of the training to utilize the knowledge acquired as the country prepares to go for another general election in 2020.