Gender and Media Malawi, MISA intensify gender campaign

27 Nov 2009

LILONGWE: Representatives of MISA-Malawi and Gender and Media Malawi (GEMMA) are to introduce media awards on gender issues. This is one of the resolutions the participants made at a day-long meeting they held at the College of Medicine in Blantyre on 13 November 2009.

The meeting aimed at conducting a postmortem of the Gender, Media and Elections Monitoring project that took place during the months of April 2009 and May 2009.

The participants noted at the meeting that monitoring of gender issues should be a continuous process, hence the resolution to introduce media awards on gender issues. One of the agreements is for GEMMA and MISA to work together and think of ways and means of motivating journalists to write more stories on gender issues. The awards will be given out every six months starting from January 2010. GEMMA and MISA have been tasked to mobilise resources to fund this activity.

In her opening speech, GEMMA chairperson Penelope Paliani said a 2003 Gender Media Baseline Survey showed that women constituted on average 17 percent of news sources and that even where women were represented in decision making positions, their voices were not heard in equal proportion.

Paliani further said it was against this background that Gender and Media Southern Africa (GEMSA) in collaboration with Gender Links as a build up to the elections conducted a workshop with mainstream media organizations to raise media awareness on key gender issues in the run up to the 2009 elections and at the same time empower journalists with skills to mainstream gender in election coverage.

MISA-Malawi chairperson Brian Ligomeka commended media houses that took strides in giving presidential and parliamentary aspirants, men and women, equal space and airtime in print and electronic media respectively, during the campaign period. “Our responsibility as media is to inform, educate and entertain the masses. But we should also bear in mind that there are some sectors of society, especially women, who find it tough to compete for positions against their male counterparts,' he noted.

This was the first time that MISA and GEMMA came together in 2009 to strategise on how gender issues could be prioritised by the country's media houses. The two institutions have formed a committee comprising three members from each organisation to ensure that the meeting's resolutions come to pass.