Journalists gather in Dhaka for second course on covering migration, trafficking and slavery

Thomson Reuters Foundation Editor-in-Chief, Belinda Goldsmith, poses with journalists from our first and second training courses on reporting migration, trafficking and slavery in Bangladesh. Dhaka / December 2019.

A group of 11 journalists from across Bangladesh gathered in Dhaka for a week in early December for our second course on how to cover migration, trafficking and slavery led by Editor-in-Chief Belinda Goldsmith and Bangladesh correspondent Naimul Karim.

The journalists – from newspapers, websites and TV stations – were keen to learn more about this issue with Bangladesh now home to more than one million Rohingya refugees, some of whom are being targeted by human traffickers and end up in slavery. The course is one of six such courses that the Thomson Reuters Foundation is running globally every year, funded by the Laudes Foundation. 

The journalists throughout the week learnt and practiced the best ways to find, approach and write stories about trafficking and slavery, from producing compelling headlines to engaging lead paragraphs to working on story structure. They also heard from some of the experts in the field in Bangladesh.

Guest speakers included Dr. Ahmed Saleheen from the Ministry of Expatriates Welfare and Overseas Employment, Giorgi Gigauri who heads the IOM in Bangladesh, Justice and Care country manager Mohammed Tariqul Islam, and Shumona Iqfal from the Foreign Ministry. Thomson Reuters Foundation correspondent Roli Srivastava spoke to the group about some of her award-winning recent work on trafficking and slavery in India.

“It is very timely for these kinds of workshops to be held in Bangladesh,” Gigauri told the journalists who also discussed the best ways to pitch stories on trafficking and slavery to their editors once they returned to their newsrooms.

This was the second Thomson Reuters Foundation course on migration, trafficking and slavery in Bangladesh. Participants from the first course, held in January 2019, joined the second group at a team dinner on Thursday night and shared stories of how the training had helped them write more stories about migration, trafficking and slavery in Bangladesh and led to job promotions, new jobs and travel fellowships.