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Women: International
way to use the Internet in rural Africa.
We don’t think there will be a vast
network of marginalized African
women reading Africawoman on computers.
Internet links are too expensive
and computers too rare for most
Africans. But the net is already being
used as a virtual whiteboard by our
remote news teams when they create
their Web paper together. It can be
used as a virtual post box when we
send copy to local radio stations. And
the computer can serve as a portable
printing press so information need only
be downloaded and printed out once
to then be communicated to tens of
thousands of women listening to community
radio. Using the net and the
“written word” this way, rural women
who might wait a generation to become
literate can hear what they need
to know next year, and hear it from
sisters across Africa.
This media project is not a one-way
street. Direct communication between
the rural women and journalists will
happen on a monthly basis. But we
hope e-mail will become a regular “direct”
channel, too. There is a phone
line to the women’s community radio
stations in Malawi and Mozambique.
So a computer and modem and printer
could supply Africawoman news and
allow activists to join the
virtualnewsroom intranet. Once
trained—in the cascade training event
we are fundraising to realize in March
2002—a key activist in each group will
be trained to be sufficiently skilled to
keep in touch and to start additional
local training.
We also think that editions of
Africawoman can be published to coincide
with important meetings or summits
that affect grassroots women. One
special edition is already being planned
for the Rio plus 10 summit in 2002.
Few grassroots activists ever get to attend
decision-makers’ conferences;
Africawoman will bring the mountain
to Mohammed. Not only do we plan to
send Africawoman to DTR’s entire radio
network, but we’re also working
on the idea of a weekly news service
that would become daily when those
stations have more demand for that
amount of news. We are also planning
Commonwoman—a Commonwealth
version of Africawoman to be inserted
into existing newspapers as a supplement
on March 12, 2002 (Commonwealth
Day). This would expand the
whole project to Asia while keeping
editorial control in Africa, and there
would then be a repetition of the virtual
training we’ve begun in Africa.
Worldwoman’s aim is to train groups
of women journalists throughout the
world to work together to create their
own virtual or actual publications, to
encourage women’s community radio
networks, and to have top quality journalists
writing for a weekly
Worldwoman that will be essential reading
to half the world’s population, and
pretty damn interesting for men, too.
In countries around the world, women
are confronting similar challenges and
fighting similar battles, and even though
they are separated by continents,
oceans, languages, customs and religions,
by mixing technology with cleverness,
enthusiasm and skill building,
connections through news can and
should be made. ■
Lesley Riddoch is editor of
Worldwoman.
lesley.riddoch@bbc.co.uk
In Nigerian Newspapers, Women Are Seen, Not Heard
Even influential women journalists stay away from coverage of women’s issues.
By Christine Anyanwu
The Punch, the widest circulating
daily in Nigeria, did something
savvy October 20. On the cover,
Stella, the gorgeous wife of President
Obasanjo, was stepping out for an occasion
with two equally gorgeously
dressed women. There was no detail
on where they went; no words heard
from them. No stories. Just big color
pictures. In this edition, women made
the cover, back page, and seven other
pages, a total of nine out of its 55
pages. Who can resist the face of a
beautiful woman? The paper’s vendors
had a field day. That morning, other
papers lost out in the fierce competition
for a narrowing market.
A content analysis of mainstream
media in Nigeria reveals one dominant
orientation: Women are largely seen
and not heard. Their faces adorn newspapers.
However, on important national
and international issues, they
fade out. Even when the news is about
them, the story only gains real prominence
if there is a male authority figure
or newsmaker on the scene.
Ask any editor in Lagos, the media
center of Nigeria, and he will argue his
paper is issue-oriented, keen on serious
news, and gender-blind. That
would tend to suggest that whatever
makes news gets covered, whoever is
involved gets heard. But the reality is
that it is not quite so. The definition of
news, what makes news, real marketable
news in Nigeria inevitably excludes
a sizeable chunk of the population,
especially women. By the 1991 population
count, women make up 49.92
percent of the population; that is .8
percent less than the men. But from
politics to economy, technology, commerce
and industry to crime, very few
women’s voices are heard in the mainstream
media.
At the heart of this practice is tradition.
Historically, the local media has
been dominated by men, a situation
that persists. A recent survey conducted
by the Independent Journalism Center
68 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001