The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has elicited the support of online publishers for the promotion of Child rights issues in Nigeria.
UNICEF said that online news has become a major plank for information dessimination and can no longer be ignored by any serious organisations seeking to push its interests forward.
Rising from a two-day dialogue with members of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) in Enugu on Friday, UNICEF emphasised that issues affecting children across Nigeria and the world are so crucial that they could not be kept in the dark.
Describing children as the vulnerable part of the society, the UNICEF’s Communication Specialist, Geoffrey Njoku who coordinated the dialogue, regretted that voices of children have been shut out from media because they are seen as not important.
He said that the shutting out of the voices of the children has been one of the discrimination which the UN General Assembly’s Convention on the Right of the Child is out to correct.
Njoku was however happy that with the dialogue, things would change in favour of the children, even as the Online Publishers requested the UNICEF to participate by supplying relevant news materials on children for them.
The dialogue was addressed by among other academics, the Head of Department of Mass Communications of the University of Lagos, Abigail Ogwezzy Ndisika, an associate professor.
Ndisika made it clear that the future development of any society is determined and shaped by the kind of children such society breed.
In a brief remark, GOCOP President, Mr. Malachy Agbo, said that the online publishers were willing to deploy the resources of their platforms to advance the course of child rights.
Agbo said that the dialogue was an eye opener to online publishers, promising that with what they learnt they would keep the fire of child right issues burning.
