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The Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, the advocacy body for the telecommunications Industry in Ghana, has launched a new awards scheme known as the Technology Industry Media Excellence Awards.
This was announced in Accra during the yearly media dialogue engagement of the Chamber.
The awards ceremony, to be held on a yearly basis, will reward eligible journalists with recognised media houses as well as freelance journalists for their contribution to the progress of the industry.
Areas of concentration for the awards would include reports issues affecting Tower companies, Mobile Network Operators, Fibre infrastructure companies, Original Equipment Manufacturers, Electronic Money issuers among others.
Awardees would receive cash prizes, certificates, mementos and a study tour to an industry members’ operations in Ghana.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber, Dr Kenneth Ashigbey, said the awards initiative was to encourage the Fourth Estate of the realm to take on some of the key issues within the technology ecosystem in the country.
He explained that the new awards scheme would at the end of the day, seek to reward deserving journalists who were contributing to the development of the telecommunications ecosystem and the technology ecosystem as a whole, through the insightful stories and reports they produced.
Media practitioners would be expected to submit as many stories and reports as they wanted, in order to qualify for an award with the final winners determined by three eminent personalities within Ghana’s telecommunications and media landscape — Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, Cynthia Lumor and Gayheart Mensah, who would serve as final judges of the Technology Industry Media Excellence Awards.
The current Board Chairman of the Minerals Development Fund and former CEO of the Chamber, Mr Sakyi-Addo, speaking at the event, stressed the important and transformative role that telecommunications and technology had played in driving economic growth in the country and the rest of the world said it was important that the stories that would be told were made simple for ordinary Ghanaians.
The Deputy Managing Director of Tullow Ghana, Mrs Lumor, also said she expected award winning stories to be relevant, accurate, have correct style and grammar.
She added that the stories and reports must be objective, independent and informative among others.
A Media and Communications Consultant, Gayheart Mensah, for his part, said the media has an important role to play when it comes to partnering the telecommunications and technology ecosystem as a whole to perform their functions well to improve lives of the ordinary Ghanaian.
