Communications experts within the GMES and Africa programme are scaling up their game plan to meet the evolving requirements for communicating to their stakeholders and audiences. As the programme rolls out its second implementation phase, there is a renewed imperative to strengthen awareness raising and engagement of the broad spectrum of stake and interest holders. Ten communications functionaries representing the various consortia and the African Union Commission recently concluded a confab in Lusaka, Zambia, where they produced a design on reinvigorating their existing communications strategy. The session was convened in parallel with the first continental workshop on Water and Natural Resources Service of the programme.
Communications is a key pillar of GMES and Africa, underpinning the need for information sharing, outreach and engagement to realize the programme’s core objectives. It drives African ownership of a continental initiative seeking to address sustainable development priorities through earth observation products and services, says Adiatou Fatty of the African Union Commission, who is the communications lead for the GMES and Africa programme. Fatty opined that effective communication is essential for mobilizing regional and continental actors to collaborate in devising solutions to socio-economic needs of African populations using earth observation. Such engagement and collaboration is also crucial for enlisting and sustaining the support of international partners, in particular the European Union, which shares a common agenda of addressing cross-cutting global issues including climate change, the environment, and natural resource management.
At the Lusaka convergence, GMES and Africa communications experts were unanimous in underlining the need to craft a strategy tailor-made for the specificities and needs of the programme. This calls for both industry and custom-oriented approaches, tools and techniques. Modern digital technologies and platforms provide limitless opportunities in this regard, whilst intimating the need for users to be strategic in using tools and platforms that serve their purpose. A communications strategy that is evidence-based and data-driven was therefore considered the most viable for a scientific and multi-stakeholder programme. It deploys appropriate metrics in identifying and segregating stakeholders, packaging information, developing messages, selecting channels and most importantly, generating a monitoring and evaluation system for feedback and decision making.
The applied dimension of communicating with stakeholders and audiences was not the lone subject addressed by GMES and Africa’s communications gurus. They doubled down on their search for integrative mechanisms to build communities of practice, which begins with the communicators themselves. It was therefore emphasized that the communications team must create seamless channels of internal communication that foster a permanent interface for cross-fertilization of information, ideas and best practices. Once established, this exemplar will be replicated with networks of regional and continental communicators to work together in promoting earth observation. The team implored the support of project leaders to accord communications the attention and priority it deserves. They contend that creative resourcing and capacity building, for example, are not only a commitment of GMES and Africa, but means to actualizing the power of communications.
