Afghan Women Journalists: Challenge & Solution
Young journalists trained to represent female colleagues
Women journalists from across Afghanistan have been introduced to gender studies on Afghan women journalists and some have received internships with practical training in representing females within the journalists’ union.
by Maryam Bahar Sadat
At a one-day workshop entitled, Challenges of Afghan Women Journalists and the Solutions, a group of 25 young women journalists from capital cities and provinces of Afghanistan got together in groups to suggest solutions to the issues faced by women working in the country’s media.
They workshopped three questions which we identified for them:
1. The current situation and the participation of Afghan women journalists in society, compared to male journalists. How supportive was the system for women, as compared to men?
2. What are the challenges of Afghan women journalists?
3. What were the expectations of our participants from Afghanistan’s existing media associations, unions and organizations?
One main purpose of this workshop was to introduce the objectives of IAWRT, and the young journalists were quite excited about the activities which IAWRT is doing all over the world and they showed their interest in volunteering and being a part of a great network.
Currently we are in the phase II of Rasana Project with Internews. The first phase was to develop gender policy for the federation and in this phase, the focus is mostly on the implementation of that policy in the federation and the training of second-tier leaders.
At the end of workshop, six of the participants were selected as second-tier leaders to receive practical training in representing women in the Afghan Journalists Federation and others were selected as representatives of IAWRT Afghanistan for their provinces.
Over seven months, these six young journalists will learn leadership skills, along with learning the practical work and procedures inside the federation such as; conducting monthly meetings of the federation, advocacy for other women in media and arranging different national and international meetings for the federation. From time to time they will participate in digital security, public speaking, communication, safety and other related training.
