Muscat: Represented by the Government Communication Centre, the Ministry of Information on Wednesday organised the 15th Outreach Gathering aimed to bring together operators of government media and communication departments.
The forum was attended by Dr. Abdullah Nasser Al Harrasi, Minister of Information.
The gathering, titled ‘Communicating with Youth—listening to them & engaging them’, seeks to enhance the role of government departments responsible for maintaining and sustaining communication with youth.
It comes in implementation of the Royal directives of His Majesty Sultan Haitham Bin Tarik stated in his first nation address (23 February 2020), in which he said,
“Youth are the wealth of a nation, its inexhaustible resources and the arms that built it (the nation). They are its present and future.”
In the speech, His Majesty the Sultan stressed the need to found mechanisms and channels of communication with youth in order to highlight efforts undertaken to meet the requirements of the development march in all sectors.
The forum also reviewed the basic pillars of effective communication with youth, incentives to foster their role in the development process, engage them and reward them by channeling the outcome of development efforts to them.
The discussion covered specific ways of carrying out the Royal directives when interacting with the youth segment. The process involves selecting the right topics and utilising the right measures of communication in accordance with the issues of concern to youth.
It was agreed that the practices would be set in ‘frames of action’ and ‘determinants’ that guide government departments when implementing youth communication activities.
The forum explored leading experiences on engaging Omani youth in decision making and visions at the national level.
