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• How to report on the economy

How to report on the economy

25 February 2008

Twenty journalists from Sierra Leone receive training on budget and financial reporting

“Before today, I never knew that a budget speech was only a projection of what a government needs to raise,” said John Koroma, a journalist with the Standard Times newspaper in Sierra Leone.

His admission came after the first of a three-day workshop on budget and financial reporting, which opened on 20 February 2008 in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown.

The workshop, which trained 20 journalists, was organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat in partnership with the Centre for Policy and Development, based in Sierra Leone.

In recent years, Sierra Leone’s economic and financial news has received very little coverage in both the print and broadcast media.

“There is a tendency to take a political angle in every story, even on things like business or economics, because that is usually what sells,” said Ben Kargbo, freelance journalist and a presenter with Citizen FM radio station, who attended the workshop.

He added that the workshop showed journalists “how to analyse the budget and [other] financial issues, which will help us improve our general knowledge of the subject and the quality of our reporting.”

Sierra Leone is currently rebuilding its economy after a twelve-year civil war. Most of the country’s infrastructure – including roads and telecommunications – were destroyed, and key economic activities such as agriculture and mining were affected.

Efforts from the government to rebuild the economy following the civil war include embarking on a privatisation plan to sell off state controlled institutions and parastatals – companies wholly or partly owned by a government - to private investors. There are also plans by the Central Bank to launch a stock exchange.

Such initiatives, according to Alhaji Ibrahim Kargbo, Sierra Leone’s Minister for Information and Communication, underscore the importance of financial journalism and the need to report accurately and analytically.

“For the purposes of clearly educating members of the public, the media should be knowledgeable enough to draw a neat and clear line between the fiscal policies of the state and the monetary policies,” he said in his keynote address.

Mr Kargbo hopes that the journalists would form an association of financial reporters to create a permanent forum for financial reporting.

The workshop featured interactive training sessions where journalists were given set assignments to perform in groups, as well as presentations from key experts from the media and economic fields.

Professor Anya Schiffrin, from the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, based at Columbia University in the US spoke on the pros and cons of setting up a new stock market, increased regulations on disclosure, how the IPO process works and the main company stories that reporters are expected to cover (click here). She also highlighted the global agreement on the dangers of capital market liberalization and the need for trade agreements which are fair to all (click here).

The event was funded by the Commonwealth Media Development Fund, which offers financial support for programmes designed to help strengthen the broadcast and print media in Commonwealth developing countries.