The Union of Journalists of South Sudan (UJOSS) with support from Norwegian People’s Aid – NPA handed nine laptop computers to nine state branch offices across South Sudan, except Western Equatoria State who requested theirs to be sent inform of money in early May.

Our Western Equatoria State office have computers which were donated by some UN agencies and so their budget for computer was used for organizing a mini World Press Freedom event in Maridi County.

The laptops will be used for doing official work in each branch office, such as sharing media reports and media landscape reports.

During the handover of the computers on Wednesday UJOSS President Oyet Patrick Charles noted the challenge of getting funds meant for media development from some donors.

“Our biggest challenge is the issue of getting money from the donors,” he said.

Adding, “We have some support in kind and we really need the support to go to the states, unfortunately some institutions don’t see that as important. We are very keen on having the offices of the states functioning and that is why also we are very keen when opportunities come we want to balance so that people from the states go,” he noted.

For his part, Majak Daniel Kuany, UJOSS Secretary General hailed NPA for the support.

“We have been having some partnership with the Norwegian People’s Aid of which they have been supporting us. It has been a good partner that we first approached when we came in as a new executive for the union,” he said.

Adding, “We have procured for all the states 9 computers except for Western Equatoria who requested theirs to be sent in form of money because they wanted to use part of the money for celebrating World Press Freedom, and that is why the computers are nine,” he further clarified.

While. Buga Alex Yusto, a Yei based UJOSS Coordinator in Central Equatoria State said the computers will relieve most coordinators from using their phones for sending reports to the head office in Juba.

“We as the coordinators across the 10 states are very privileged this morning to receive the laptops. These laptops are not individually owned but they belong to the offices at state levels. My appeal is that we should use them as public tools that can facilitate our work to go. Because we have been using our phones or other people’s computers in most cases to share information. The kind of work we do has a lot of issues to do with intimidation and security and it is important to have our own gadgets for doing our work to avoid leakage of some of the information,” he said.

In the next phase of the project, UJOSS plans to send more computers to the recently formed offices in the three administrative areas of South Sudan.