The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)
Kagashe Beatus
27 August 2008
The Citizen feature writer Salome Gregory has won the 2008 Water Sanitation Hygiene (Wash) Media Award in the gender category.
Ms Gregory was presented with the accolade at the Wash Media Awards gala in Stockholm last week. The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) and the Stockholm International Water Institute (Siwi) sponsored the event.
The awards aim at raising public awareness about community problems through media to pave the way for decision-makers at all levels to act.
Ms Gregory emerged the winner in the gender award category for her feature highlighting hardships that pupils were facing in Same District due to lack of water.
The article said girls were unable to attend school when they were in menstruation because there was no water for keeping them clean as most of them had only one pair of school uniform.
The article also said some pupils skipped school on Wednesdays to trek up to 30km in search of water.
Ms Gregory urged journalists in the country to write about issues touching on people's lives at the grassroots. She said water and sanitation issues are not covered well in Africa where many journalists concentrated on politics.
"Let's be the voice of the voiceless. Reporters must not choose what to write. We must write about topics that depict the lives of ordinary people," she said.
Ms Gregory said she was assigned to write an article on the shortage of science teachers in secondary schools in Same District when she realised that the shortage of water was a far more serious problem. She also urged media houses to uplift junior journalists by sending them to rural areas to write about the harsh realities of life that ordinary people faced.
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