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http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/04/in-bangladesh-gender-equality-comes-on-the-airwaves/
Bangladesh – Community Radio By Women Brings Gender Issues to
Rural Areas
Community
radio stations in Bangladesh provide newscasters the opportunity to discuss
topics of relevance to rural women. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS
By Naimul Haq
DHAKA,
Apr 8 2015 (IPS) - Judging by how often they make headlines, one might be tempted
to believe that women in Bangladesh don’t play a major role in this country’s
affairs.
A
recent media monitoring survey
by the non-governmental organisation Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha (BNPS)
revealed that out of 3,361 news items studied over a two-month period, “Only 16
percent of newspaper stories, 14 percent of television news [items], and 20
percent of radio news [items] considered women as subjects or interviewed
them.”
Fewer than
eight percent of all the stories had women as the central focus. Of the few
women who actually made an appearance on the TV screen, 97 percent were reading
out the news, while just three percent fell into the category of ‘reporters’.
Only
0.03 percent of all bylined stories studied during that period carried a
woman’s name.
The
monitoring report found that even though more women appeared in photographs
than men, they were quoted far fewer times, proving the old proverb that, in
this country of 157 million people, women are still “seen and not heard.”
While
these statistics might seem daunting, women across the country who are not
content to sit by and wait for the situation to change have taken matters into
their own hands. They are doing so by getting on the airwaves and using the
radio as a tool to raise the voices of women and bring rural issues into the
limelight.
Women
comprise 49 percent of Bangladesh’s population. Like the vast majority of
people here they are concentrated in rural areas, where 111.2 million people –
or 72 percent of the population – live.
Their
distance from policy-making urban centres casts a double cloak of invisibility
over women: according to data gleaned from the BNPS study, a mere 12 percent of
newspaper articles, seven percent of TV news items and just five percent of
radio stories focused on rural or remote areas – even though urban areas cover
just eight percent of this vast country’s landmass, and host just 28 percent of
the population.
The
absence of women and women’s issues in the media is a dangerous trend in a
country that ranked 142nd out of 187 states in the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP)’s most recent Gender
Inequality Index (GII), making Bangladesh one of the worst
performers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Yet,
even this is not mentioned in the news: the BNPS study showed that less than
one percent of over 3,000 news items surveyed made any mention of gender
inequality, while only 11 news stories challenged prevailing gender
stereotypes.
Given
that Bangladesh has an extremely low literacy
rate of 59 percent compared to the global average
of 84.3 percent, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the importance of radio cannot be
underestimated.
Even
in a nation where 24 percent of the population lives below the poverty line,
radio is a widespread, relatively affordable means of plugging into the world,
and is extremely popular among the millions of rural families that comprise the
bulk of this country.
Lifting the voices of rural women
Momena
Ferdousi, a 24-year-old student hailing from Bangladesh’s northwestern Chapai
Nawabganj District, is one of the country’s up-and-coming radio professionals.
She
is the senior programme producer for Radio Mahananda,
a community radio station launched in 2011 that caters primarily to the
thousands of farming families in this agricultural region that comprises part
of the 7,780-square-km Barind Tract.
She
tells IPS she would not be where she is today without the support and training
she, and scores of other aspiring female radio workers, received from the Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication
(BNNRC).
Fellowships
and capacity-building initiatives sponsored by BNNRC have resulted in a flood
of women filling the posts of producers, anchors, newscasters, reporters and
station managers in 14 regional community radio stations around the country.
“The
road to my employment was challenging,” Ferdousi explains, “but BNNRC saw the
potential in me and [other] female journalists and I believe we have made
substantial changes by addressing gaps in women’s right to information.”
Miles
away, the confident voice of Sharmin Sultana on Radio Pollikontho,
broadcast in the northeastern district of Moulvibazar, reaches roughly 400,000
people spread over a 17-km radius.
With
five hours of daily programming that focus largely on issues relevant to rural
women, Radio Pollikontho has filled a huge gap in this community.
“It
is an amazing feeling to conduct a programme, interact live with guests and
respond to our audience’s requests to discuss health, women’s rights, social
injustice, education and agriculture,” Sultana tells IPS. “When we began we had
only one programme on women’s issues, now we run five programmes weekly,
exclusively dedicated to women.”
“Most
of our audience are poor,” she explains, “and they either don’t have access to
television or cannot read newspapers. So FM radio, available even on the
cheapest mobile phone, has been very popular and the demand for interactive
live programmes is increasing by the day.”
The
difficulties facing women here in Bangladesh are legion.
Only
16.8 million women are employed in the formal sector, with the vast majority of
them performing unpaid domestic labour on top of their duties in the farm or
field.
A
lack of financial independence makes them extremely vulnerable to domestic
violence: a recent study
by the deputy director of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) found that
87 percent of currently married women have experienced physical violence at the
hands of their husbands, while 98 percent say they have been sexually
‘violated’ by their spouses at some point during marriage.
The
survey also revealed that one-third of all married women faced ‘economic abuse’
– the forcible withholding of a partner’s financial assets for the purpose of
maintaining financial dependence on the perpetrator of violence.
In
2011, 330 women were killed in dowry-related violence.
Other
issues, like child marriage, also make pressing news bulletins for community
radio stations directed at women: according to United Nations data,
some 66 percent of Bangladeshi girls are married before their 18th
birthday.
The
situation is bleak, but experts say that as women become educated and aware of
their rights, the tide will inevitable turn for the better.
BNNRC
Chief Executive Officer A H M Bazlur Rahman, who pioneered rural radio
broadcasting efforts around the country, tells IPS, “Issues like budget
allocation, lack of appropriate sanitation, violence against women, fighting
corruption, [and] education for girls are [often] neglected by policy makers.
But if we can give women a voice, these problems [will] gradually disappear.”
It
remains to be seen whether or not more women’s voices on the air will uplift
the half of Bangladesh’s population in need of empowerment. But every time a
woman’s voice crackles to life on a radio show, it means one more woman out
there is hearing her story, learning her rights and moving closer to equality.