The National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) took another giant leap towards repositioning its Media relations and ensuring the Nigeria Public get the right messages on HIV/AIDS with the inauguration of a 13 member Media Advisory Committee by the Director General Professor John Idoko on Tuesday the 17th of February 2010.

The event took place in the conference room of NACA and had in attendance the members of the committee chaired by Mr. Jimmy Ate a retired veteran broadcaster from the National Television Authority; other distinguished personalities from various media organisations and a Professor of theatre arts from the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria.

In his opening remarks, the Director General informed everyone that NACA’s engagement of the Media is to become more strategic since the Media component in most of our activities is about 60%. The two areas to be given more attention include our corporate communication and behaviour change communication. He said that the committee should think about innovative ways that the Media can key into prevention and take messages beyond the conventional media channels.

The chairman of the committee Mr. Jimmy Ate thanked the DG for inaugurating the committee and employed his colleagues to assist in reaching the Nigerian Public. He noted the benefits the Media has gained from NACA amongst which include training on HIV/AIDS reporting and support to attend National and International conferences. He assured that the committee would do a lot to support NACA’s Media activities.

After the inauguration ceremony, the committee held a brief meeting to highlight issues of immediate concern that would be discussed at the next meeting. Some of these issues include:
•    Training of Journalists on HIV/AIDS
•    Use of alternative media especially in the rural areas
•    Media tours to get first hand information from project sites
•    Bridging the gap in behaviour change communication in the urban and rural areas
•    Carry behaviour change communication messages to urban slums
•    Establishing clear and simple indicators for monitoring behaviour change and the impact of messages
•    Enhancing moral education using traditional forms like songs, dances, and drama
•    The need to make more accessible correct and basic information and statistics about the epidemic.
•    Retention of trained journalist by media organisations