www.waccglobal.org;
www.whomakesthenews.org
Gender and Media Advocacy
Training Workshop
3-5 December 2007, Nairobi, Kenya
Nairobi Declaration on Gender and Media Advocacy
Preamble
We the media practitioners, CBOs,
NGOs, trainers and media monitors from Southern, Eastern, Central and Western
African countries attending the Gender and Media Advocacy Training Workshop in
Nairobi, Kenya from December 3rd to 5th, 2007, are
concerned with the gender imbalances and portrayal within news media reporting
in Africa.
Recognising that the 2005 Global
Media Monitoring Project coordinated by the World Association for Christian
Communication (WACC) in which 76 countries participated, reveals that 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
exclude or objectify women which shows insensitivity and poor media ethics.
The current emphasis on Gender and
Development (GAD) as an outcome of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA),
brings to bear the need for media practitioners to recognise the agency and
plight of women by promoting 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.
Therefore, we call upon the media to exercise
their responsibility to the public and apply the standards and practices of
good governance and democracy in line with freedom of speech and
expression.
We see many opportunities to address
the problem and contribute to more gender balanced media reporting in
partnership with editors, regulatory institutions, journalists’ associations,
government, communication and information officers, and civil society amongst
others. We therefore propose as follows:
Actions
1.
Gender and media
sensitisation
-
To sensitize the media
on gender balanced reporting. This can be done by exposing practitioners and
civil society to the GMMP 2005 findings; particularly on how best the media can
respond to the critical observation that women still do not make news. To
achieve this, we will engage the media in debates on the GMMP 2005 findings to
address the issues raised in the report.
-
To expose media to
existing gender instruments which would guide gender responsive coverage.
-
To target both the
mainstream and community media through meetings, workshops and informal
sessions.
2.
Training of trainers
-
To organise a regional
training of gender and media monitoring trainers workshop, covering sub-Saharan
Africa.
-
To replicate the
training of trainers nationally and facilitate expansion of GMMP 2010 into new
countries.
-
To develop a training
manual for gender and media monitoring.
3. Regional Directory of
Women Experts
-
To create a regional
on-line and print version of the directory of women experts covering diverse
thematic areas.
-
To partner with
existing networks and contacts in the region to develop the directory.
-
To distribute the
directory to media in order to increase the ratio of women as news sources.
4. Media literacy
training
-
To raise critical
gender and media awareness with consumers and encourage their active engagement
with media.
-
To create an
interactive gender and media monitoring website for media users.
-
To promote the use of
traditional forms of communication, radio and short text messages (sms) to
enhance critical media literacy.
-
To establish annual
gender media awards in recognition of best practices in this area.
5.
Gender sensitive media codes of conduct
- To
review existing media codes of ethics and communication policies in sub-Saharan
Africa to establish whether or not they are gender sensitive.
- To
propose amendments of the codes to make them more gender responsive.
- To
advocate for the adoption, dissemination and enforcement of these codes.
3-5 December 2007, Nairobi, Kenya