African governments must use public relations professionals to tell their stories – APRA President

Mr Arik Karani, the President of the African Public Relations Association (APRA), has paid a courtesy call on Ghana’s Minister of Information, Mrs Fatimatu Abubakar, to strategise on ways to join forces to project positive stories of Ghana and Africa to the global audience.

Mr Karani, also the President of Kenyan Public Relations Association and the Lead Communications person for Community Resilience and Sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation, underscored the need for African governments to use communication and public relations tools to tell their success stories to the global audiences.

He also urged country-based public relations associations to collaborate with their respective governments in enhancing the reputation of their countries to the global community.

“I strongly believe that AFRA must help Africa to shine the light on their success stories and not only telling their stories to the global community but “story doing” to make positive impact.

Mr Karani pledged to work collaboratively with African ministers of Communications and Information to brand the continent positively globally to attract investment opportunities.

Madam Esther A.N. Cobbah, the President of the Institute of Public Relations (IPR), Ghana, who led the delegation, said public relations played a critical role in branding corporate entities and nations, and thus pledged the IPR’s commitment to working with the Ministry of Information to projecting its activities to the public.

She also used the opportunity to announce to the Minister, the IPR’s plans to celebrate its 50th anniversary this year on the theme, “Public Relations: The Value Creator”.

Madam Cobbah underscored the need for PR professionals to add value to themselves through training in order to project their respective corporate entities positively to their audiences and stakeholders.

She also announced the IPR’s plans to organise training programmes for political communicators to communicate ethically, especially as the nation heads to a crucial election on December 7.

That, she said, would prevent potential of creating tension and hurting people’s emotions.

Madam Fatimatu Abubakar, the Minister of Information, on her part, expressed gratitude to the delegation and pledged her Ministry’s readiness to working with the APRA and the IPR to brand the government’s communications positively to both the local and global audiences.

She also pledged to strengthen and resource the Ministry’s Public Relations Division to train PR practitioners assigned to the various Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to execute their work professionally.

The Minister underscored the need for inter-sectorial exchange of knowledge and experiences to help PR practitioners working in both public and private sectors to learn from each other.

The Minister also disclosed that plans were far advanced to begin the third cohort of the Media Capacity Enhancement Programme this year.

So far, 140 media practitioners have benefited from the programme since its inception about two years ago.

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