Women's Empowerment and Good Governance Through - amarc

Best Experiences for an Action Research Process 80
respective community radio. The most important change women want is to improve women’s
access to leadership, decision making, management, and to editorial, financial and accounting
responsibilities. The survey showed that women occupy only 28 per cent of the leadership
positions in community radio. There are still a number of stations that have no women on the
board or at the management level. Among the radio staff, women are often reduced to the
role of presenters, of so called “soft news,” while the “hard news” are being drafted by male
editors. Women’s issues are often considered “soft news,” they are left to women anchors but
at the same time, they are not given the same importance in the programming as to what is
considered “hard news”. In other words, women tend to be much less interviewed on the radio
and they tend to have much less chances to hold governments accountable.
It is not surprising therefore that when we asked the women broadcasters about what they
consider to be the most important training needs, their priorities were the following:
• Gender and feminist perspectives in community radio
• Management, administration and sharing in the decision making
• Production and technical skills including ICTs
AMARC-WIN is working toward women’s empowerment within the individual community radio
stations, and among the community radio movement, by responding to women’s training
needs and facilitating the exchange of experiences and best practices among its members.
Through the network of women community radio broadcasters, we strengthen and support
each other and establish direct contacts. Here are some examples: Women from one community
radio station in Nepal tell their sisters in another station how they were able to get editorial
freedom for their own women’s program; In a training on engendered peace journalism by Isis
International-Manila, a young woman broadcaster from a small community radio station taught
an anchor woman who was in commercial broadcasting for 20 years how to operate the mixing
console and how to edit her interview; A community radio broadcaster from Bangalore will
conduct a radio workshop at a rural women’s conference in Tamil Nadu thanks to a contact
between the two organizations established by AMARC-WIN.
But knowledge sharing needs to go beyond the broadcasters. AMARC-WIN plans to initiate
program content sharing, so that not only do the community radio broadcasters learn from
each other, but also their respective listeners. Listeners need to learn how women in com-