Last week Friday, we held a free blogging and social media training in Makueni County as we had promised earlier.
#baketrainig Bloggers Association of Kenya training Makueni residents on better usage of social media
— cyrus kioko (@cyrohjina) March 20, 2015
Njeri Wangari took the eager attendees through basics of blogging and social media, writing skills and readership, personal online branding and understanding copyright. To our delight, the room was filled up even before Njeri Wangari kicked things off. Before the training started, there was a round of introductions in which everyone acknowledged that they would like to know more about blogging and social media. A few more people came in the course of the training but luckily, there were some extra chairs stacked at the corner so it was just a matter of making room for them.
There were a few existing bloggers who benefited from extra insights on how to enhance their blogs. There were also quite a number of people who were interested but were not blogging yet. It was easy to impart knowledge on all of them though because Njeri went through practical lessons on how to create a blog, as well as how to embed tweets and photographs on a blogpost among other things. All these were done using Makueni as an example so that the lessons hit home better.
The Makueni Governor @governorkibwana is very active on social media where he communicates a lot of info from his Govt #BAKEtraining
— BAKE (@BAKE_ke) March 20, 2015
It helped that Makueni County government is active on social media, and so is the governor himself. It was therefore easy to tell the story to a people whose leader was already leading from the front in matters digital.
Our travel to go training in Makueni coincided with the launch of Jukumu Letu activities which were taking place in Unoa grounds the following day. Jukumu letu is an initiative that we are part of, that aims to ensure that citizens understand the constitution and accept that it is also their responsibility to understand it thoroughly and embrace it for smoother running of their lives and for better relationship with their governments.
@oleshitemi taking trainees of the #BakeTraining through devolution & what role social media is playing #JukumuLetu pic.twitter.com/gjRx9kuReE
— Jukumu Letu (@jukumuniletu) March 20, 2015
The citizen angle to our visit to Makueni also provided a perfect backdrop for Shitemi Kamandi who was training on the working of devolution and the role that social media is playing in it. Shitemi also took the opportunity to emphasize the importance of knowing and understanding the constitution.
With that we came to the end of a successful training and people broke off to go and do some networking as we shared some snacks and refreshments.