By Babirekere Clothilda
Engendering media to achieve equal and sensitive representation of women has been an effort of various interventions from Uganda Media Women’s Association, UMWA. This has included; awareness creation, media monitoring to identify gender gaps, advocacy, capacity strengthening of media on gender issues, mentorships and networking.
These efforts have indeed amounted to improvement in women visibility despite the marginal and slow actualization. The 2020 GMMP report indicates that women visibility has increased to 24% with women as news sources and subjects from 17% in 2010.
The 7% rate is among which, strongly attributed to improved reporting of media with gender sensitivity and responsiveness. The realized skills and change are a result of training sessions that UMWA persistently and consistently empowers journalists with.
In partnership with the Royal Danish Embassy RDE, UMWA is within this year, strengthening capacity of 210 journalists on gender sensitive reporting from districts of; Kampala, Mbarara, Hoima, Tororo, Masaka, Kitgum and Masindi.
This one-year project, Media for Gender Equality and Socio Justice: Leaving No One Behind is to improve the portrayal of women in politics, and women at large through promoting gender responsive reporting and contributing to the elimination of stereotypes.
As one of the project’s output; “Increased knowledge and skills in gender responsive reporting among the target media practitioners”, the project is working with media personnel: practitioners, owners and managers to enhance the capacity of 210 media practitioners from 50 media houses, from the (7) focus districts.
UMWA has so far conducted trainings for 120 media practitioners, in four (4) districts (Masaka, Tororo, Kitgum and Kampala). The objective of the training is to equip the media practitioners with knowledge and skills in Gender Sensitive Reporting.
Therefore, through this category, we shine insight into beneficiaries’ experiences and change stories realized from the capacity building UMWA extends on gender and media across the seven focus districts.
Also, experiences of other beneficiaries from the different programming of UMWA and its activities shall be shared too.
