The five-week training is to build the capacity of civil society stakeholders on sustainable advocacy, mobilisation and education in strengthening democracy in the country.
It also seeks to empower CSOs to conduct sustained advocacy activities over a period and hold duty bearers to account safely and effectively.
At the opening, Sait Matty Jaw, executive director at the Center for Research and Policy Development (CRPD), outlined that CRPD in partnership with Freedom House is implementing advocacy training as mechanisms to provide training and skills development for civil society actors and organisations to learn and transfer knowledge among themselves.
"The training will be based on real issues promotion of rights, freedom of expression and rights."
Jaw equally urged participants to transfer the knowledge gained to others at the end of the training to ensure that they build connection and friendship throughout the advocacy.
Alagie Nyang, an advocacy specialist at the Freedom House revealed that his organisation is currently working with MaJAC to roll out series of trainings for the media and CSOs geared towards building the capacity of people in the media.
"At Freedom House, we deemed it necessary to professionally train people in-depth so that they can be able to impact on others than organising workshop which may not even have any out at the end of the day."
Muhammad M.S. Bah, president of The Gambia Press Union (GPU), called on participants to take the training seriously and take advantage of the social media to advocate for positive change in the society.
