A week-long workshop will be used to finalise a communication strategy that the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment [M.N.R.E.] hopes will strengthen external partnerships including with the media.

The Communication and Knowledge Management Strategy workshop started on Monday at the Taumeasina Island Resort, which the Ministry’s management said should result in the validation of the sector communication strategy.

The M.N.R.E. Environment Sector Coordinator, Frances Reupena, said in an interview that the communication strategy document has been divided into different sections which will be reviewed and finalised.

“We’ve had two validation processes involving M.N.R.E. and then separately with the external stakeholders,” she said. “We now have a final document and we wanted to go through it again to tie up a few loose ends.”

When reviewing the communication strategy, Ms Reupena said the workshop would look at its objectives and what can be achieved from the document.

“The workshop looks at the objectives and what we want to achieve from this communication strategy and making sure that we’ve got appropriate activities identified to support the implementation and the achievement of our objectives.”

She said the objectives of the communication strategy is to enhance the capacity of the Ministry as well as improve its environmental advocacy through messages, awareness programs, outreach programs as well as accessing information from stakeholders.

The Ministry is also looking at improving the quality of communications that go out to their stakeholders. 

“We’ve held external stakeholder workshops and we also had another validation process with our external stakeholders, after whom a final document had been produced,”  Ms Reupena explained. 

“But now the M.N.R.E. being the lead agency, we feel that we need to go over it again, validate it and then proceed to endorse the document as whole.”

Ms Reupena further reiterated that they hope that with this communication strategy, it will strengthen their partnership and collaboration with their partners as well as the media. 

“One of the key things that we have identified is needing improvement in particular with the media in terms of environmental reporting and so that we’ve identified capacity building programs, training us in order to provide quality, updated and valid information to the media and making sure also that the media is able to report environmental issues,” she added.

They have also identified that one of the crucial aspects of the work that they do is ensuring that information is available and easily accessible by their stakeholders including the media.