Gender And Media Advocacy Training Workshop
The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in partnership with African Woman and Child Feature Service (AWC) will hold a 3-day training workshop on gender and media advocacy.
The workshop is for participants from Anglophone Africa and takes place in Nairobi from 3 to 5 December, 2007.
The workshop is a follow-up to the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2005, the most extensive global research into gender in the media ever undertaken that mapped the representation of women and men in the news media in 76 countries. (URL: www.whomakesthenews.org).
The results of GMMP 2005 show that women are dramatically under-represented in the news. Only 21% of news subjects are female and women’s voices are rarely heard in the topics that dominate the news agenda. In stories on government and politics, women make up only 14% of news subjects and in economics and business news only 20%. When women do make the news it is primarily as ‘stars’ or victims. Unfair and imbalanced representation of women and men in the media perpetuates stereotypes about gender that form the basis of practices of exclusion and marginalization in everyday life situations.
The workshop is designed to equip participants with the skills and knowledge to carry out gender and media advocacy work and to start dialogue with media in order to have more balanced gender policies and representation of women. They are an opportunity for groups working on gender and media issues in sub-Saharan Africa to network and share their experiences with a view to working together in the future to develop advocacy campaigns.
Representatives from women’s non-governmental organisations and other civil society organisations in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa have confirmed their participation.
For more information on the Nairobi workshop, please email Rosemary Okello-Orlale at
info@awcfs.org
or Sarah Macharia at
sm@waccglobal.org.
