Women's Empowerment and Good Governance Through - amarc

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Best Experiences for an Action Research Process 104 enumerated a number of them: 1) “It has given me the possibility of doing something I very much like to do,” she said. “It is one more element contributing to my education, since I studied communication and because radio and video are two media that I would consider fundamental in order to document the culture and daily life of my people.” (It is worth mentioning that this young woman was awarded an international prize in video documentaries.) 2) “My mother was a midwife,” she continued, “a calling that is increasingly losing credibility among women to the idea that medical knowledge is better… What radio allows is for the knowledge which midwives have to be broadcast from the perspective of the knowledge which women of my community have had for eons. I see that radio can support my mother’s work, but, above all, that it can contribute to women’s knowledge about pregnancy and giving birth.” 3) Another point that she mentioned is that “when we have women in radio, women in the community relate to the broadcaster in a different way. It is as if they feel that they can confide in us. Sometimes we go into the street and they come up to us to ask us or tell us something. There are things that they would never dare to tell the men.” 4) “The information we are looking for and that we broadcast on the radio has to do with our culture and the recognition and transmission of our language, but we also deal with important themes for women that men have not dealt with. For example, they will never talk about how men are beating their women and their children, or at least not talk about it the way we do, with a woman’s sensibility.” The experience of young Mixe women in radio is one that repeats itself constantly in the radio stations of other communities. Women’s participation in community radio in Mexico is volunteer work, and this allows women to be in radio with the interest of carrying out work that gives them personal satisfaction and develops their skills. It also allows the words coming from the microphone to be directed to concrete and “real” men and women, acquaintances, women who are part of the reality of those who are speaking, bringing this medium closer to people than any other.I will go out on a limb with what could be a dangerous statement, but for the theme discussed here it seems to me necessary to put it on the table, and that is that perhaps
105 Best Experiences for an Action Research Process women’s participation in community radio is even more important than participation of women in other media because women in community radio are women who are visible to the community, so that there is a two-way benefit: they empower themselves by having their say and the women listening feel close to those on the radio. Women in community radio are “within reach” for the rest of the women; it is possible to dialogue amongst themselves through the radio and outside of the radio. It is possible to consult, dialogue and request information, which otherwise they could not do, because given the context of many communities (not only indigenous communities), women do not have an adequate medium nor channels for raising their concerns, their issues, or their need for specific information. In many communities, women’s participation in the taking of decisions is restricted, in some they cannot even attend community assemblies; in others, while they have access to certain spaces, there are “restricted” themes such as saying or testifying that they are victims of domestic violence, even if in many cases it is linked to alcoholism. Through the exchange of experiences of women’s participation in community radio in Mexico, I realize the importance of this participation in contributing to the good governance of a community, understanding this as the inclusion of women in the process of their own development and that of all of the population. If the development of increasingly just societies is impossible without women’s participation and the ensuing empowerment of women and recognition of their rights, the media would not be complete social actors contributing to democratization processes without the inclusion and participation of women. As women in community radio, we still have many problems to resolve. In Mexican radio, there is still a strong lag in participation. Even in the case of the radio of the Mixe people, with which we began this text, women’s participation has fluctuated, given that many of them had to spend long periods of time in the city of Oaxaca or in Mexico City for reasons of employment. In other radio stations, there has also been little participation by women for socio-cultural or economic reasons. These are the problems we in Women’s International Network of AMARC in Mexico are interested in resolving. Notes: 47.- María Eugenia Chávez Fonseca, Representative of the Women’s International Network of AMARC in Mexico, Holistic Health for Women (SIPAM).
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Women's Empowerment and Good Governance Through - amarc

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