The role of Public relations in Achieving Millennium Development Goals

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

This project comes up as a result of the observation made about ways that public relations can help to achieve the millennium development goals.

Over the years, people are not aware of the millennium development goals, whereas government believes that they can do it all alone, which pose to bed impossible. This is what give birth to the interest of carrying people along with the strategies laid down by the government to achieve millennium development goals.

The millennium development goals are designed for the people in order to help eradicate immediate problems in our various environment yet people are not informed about the programme. This project will adopt public relations as one of the tools to use to convey the millennium development goals to the people.

This project work will be beneficial to the genera public because all the goals are meant for them.

In a b id to improve the economic government all over the world came together to discuses over the economic situation of each country, where they discovered that the rich are becoming richer and the poor are becoming poorer. In view of this, they looked out for what really brings about the inequality and they finally reached eight problems which they tagged as goals.

This study over the years have not been looked into and that is why this project is aimed at enlighten people and give them insight on disturbing issues.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

The focus of this research work is to dig into the roles of public relations in achieving the millennium development goals.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This research work will enlighten the general public on the government’s programme of making life on the comfortable for them through the millennium development goals. Also, it will help us look at the relevance of public relations in achieving the goals.

SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The area of coverage for this study will be Osun State due to the limited time and limited resources.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The questions this project tends to provide answers to are for the benefit of the general public. The questions are:

To what extent are the people aware of the goals of the MDG’S.

What are the benefits derivable from the millennium development goals?

To what extent can public relations be useful to achieve millennium development goals?

DEFINITION OF TERMS

There are some words in this project work which must be defined for clear understanding!

PUBLIC RELATIONS: According to the most popular and widely accepted definition given by the British Institute of Journalism can be defined as “the deliberate planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.

THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS (MDG’S) are series of eight – time – bound development goals that seek to address issues of poverty, education, equality, health and the environment to be achieved by the year 2015. They were agreed upon by the international community at the United Nation’s Millennium summit, held in New York in September 2000.

THE NEW PARTNERSHIP FOR AFRICANS DEVELOPMENT (NEPAD): The statistics of the African continent are graphically pathetic on issues of common concern. African’s constitutes 12% of the world population but its GDP consumption of global wealth amount to only 1%. Also, African is the most infested, in terms of HIV/AIDS, malaria, polio, typhoid, tuberculosis etc. In terms of political instability, 1 out of every 5 Africans is living under conditions of conflict. All these and more are what prompted key African leaders principally, the presidents of Nigeria, South African, Algeria, Senegal and Egypt to come up with NEPAD in year 2000.

THE NIGERIAN’S NATIONAL ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT AND

DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY (NEEDS): This is Nigeria’s plan for prosperity. It is the people’s way of letting the government know what kind of Nigeria they wish to live in, now and in the future. It is the government way of letting the people know how it plans to overcome the deep and pervasive obstacles to progress that the government and people have identified. It is also a way of letting the international community know where Nigeria standard in the region and in the world and how it wishes to be supported.

MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING: It is the aim of public relations to achieve mutual understanding among its publics. This talks of a two-way communication system and effort, so that an organization may understand its publics, even as the public come to understand the organization, making it to deliberately an d continuously undertake converses of action that are in its public best interest.

PUBLICS: Public relations deals with relationship between an organization and its various publics. Public relations thus emphasis the need to ensure excellent relationship between an organization and all with whom it has to deal with and this include both internal and external publics.

OPERATIONAL PLANS

The research methodology that will be adopted in this study is survey method to gather the opinion of the people in this type of research work. The study will make use of questionnaire as an instrument for data collection.

SAMPLING PROCEDURE

This research work will adopt stratified sampling we make use of this sampling method when we have heterogeneous or large non-related population which can be divided into a number of non-overlapping homogenous strata, then take a strata sample from each stratum. The sample from each stratum shall be selected using simple random sampling.

POPULATION OF THE STUDY

The population size for this study will be 100 people, selected in Osogbo, Osun State of Nigeria. Osogbo has been chosen to represent the whole due to limited resources and limited time.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE STUDY POPULATION

The selected population of this study shall comprise of men and women, students, work class and non working class, available.

LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

This study will be limited to the information from both primary and secondary sources of data collection. So, information gathered may not be applicable to the entire country. Also, the research work will be limited to academic use.