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Africa: Media Experts Call for Gender Balance in News Reporting
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Catholic Information Service for Africa (Nairobi)
11 December 2007
Posted to the web 11 December 2007
Nairobi
Media activists from around Africa have called on the continent's news outlets to exercise gender balance in their reporting.
At a three-day training workshop in Nairobi last week, media practitioners and organisations, trainers and monitors from Southern, Eastern, Central and Western Africa decried the low and sometimes unethical coverage of women.
According to the 2005 Global Media Monitoring Project coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in which 76 countries participated, only 21 percent of news sources, subjects and authors are women; yet women comprise 52 percent of the population. In Africa, only 17 percent of women are news sources.
Noting that news media either excluded or objectified women, the participants called for promotion of gender balance in all ramifications of the mass media, including structures, policies and contents.
"During the 4th UN World Conference on Women, 53 countries recognised that to achieve development, gender equality was crucial and media was integral to the process. It is critical for the media to have a gender balance in the coverage of news sources in recognition of the integral role of women and men in national development."
The participants identified several points of intervention, including sensitizing the media on gender balanced reporting and seeking ways on how best the media can respond to the fact that women still do not make news.
There is also a need to organise a regional training of gender and media monitoring trainers' workshop, covering sub-Saharan Africa, and to develop a training manual for gender and media monitoring.
Another proposal was to create a regional on-line and print directory of women media experts covering diverse thematic areas.
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It was also noted that critical gender and media awareness with consumers should be raised and that existing media codes of ethics and communication policies in sub-Saharan Africa should be reviewed to establish whether or not they are gender sensitive.
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