Civil Rights Watch Programme
Supported by: NORAD/Norwegian Embassy, Dhaka
Project period: October 2002 – September 2005
Major activities of the project included i) organiing skill development programme for young journalists, ii) Fellowship for female graduates on journalism and iii) conducting short studies and iv) publishing a quarterly newsletter on civil rights issues.
Goals of the project were to encourage Bangladeshi media to play a greater role in the field of civil rights and voice against social injustice and crime.
Under this project, twelve training programmes were organided in different districts headquarters. Each programme continued for four days and about 250 young journalists were trained up. Because of the training programme they have become more professional in delivering better items for their respective media houses.
Thirty female graduates received six-month training on practical journalism which helped raise the overall number of female journalists in the country. During the training they have produced a good number of news-feature/in-depth reports, which was also released to major newspapers/magazines for publication and they published it with due credit. News Network also published two books compiling their items.
Thirty six short studies on various important issues were compiled during the project period. Copies of the studies were disseminated to ministers, public representatives, officials, missions’ chief and heads of national and international organizations. A number of reports were prepared based on studies’ information and released to newspapers for publication.
A quarterly newsletter titled, ‘Civil Rights Watch’ was published this time. Contents of the newsletter were mostly centred to democracy, human rights, press freedom, violence and injustice related issues.