1. About 60 men and women from national and international print, radio and television media attended the symposium. All subregions were represented and both public and private media representatives. The participants were welcomed at around 9:30am by Mr. Peter da Costa, Senior Communication Advisor ECA, and by Mme. Joséphine Ouédraogo, Director, African Centre for Women (ACW), ECA.

2. Mme. Ouédraogo explained that the Sixth Regional Conference was a part of the regular, planned consultation in the implementation process of the Dakar and Beijing Platforms for Action for the Advancement of Women. The five regions of the world were having similar mid-term review conferences in the Beijing + 5 process of evaluation and planning for the Fifth World Conference on Women. The global mid-term evaluation would take place in June 2000 in New York.

3. She said that regional review had already started with assessments done in the twelve areas of concern. Workshops had been held and national reports prepared, received and summarized by ACW. She stressed that implementation could not be left only in the hands of governments ministries, as these frequently lacked political commitment, positioning and adequate human and financial resources. She pointed out that the Dakar African Platform lacked adequate stress on institutional mechanisms for implementation.

4. The basic objectives of the Sixth Regional Conference were, therefore, to:

• Assess progress achieved thus far;
• Mobilize support for the regional plan of action for the next five years, and for the collective commitment that would be articulated in the Declaration, both to be major outcomes of the Conference; and
• Build and articulate consensus on what remains to be done, institutional mechanisms and resources needed, and how best to resolve the obstacles and constraints impeding progress.

5. Mme. Ouédraogo pointed out that gender referred to the roles and responsibilities of both men and women. It implied collective action and touched every sector of development. Both men and women were needed in political and economic decision-making. However, the special issues of women could not be disassociated from development.

6. She stressed the need to involve journalists and other media practitioners in the work of the Conference, and invited their support for sensitization of decision-makers and the general public on women’s issues. They were key to the follow-up action on policies and strategies and she invited their contribution to the evaluation of progress achieved with gender and development in Africa. She underscored that:

• Most African countries had less than 10% women in their Parliaments, with the exception of Seychelles, Mozambique and Eritrea, which had increased women’s parliamentary participation to about 25% respectively;
• Women had little access to and control of economic resources. Some 70% of the world’s most poor and vulnerable were women;
• National budgets for social sectors were always less than the demand. The maternal mortality rates and illiteracy rates for women in Africa were the highest in the world;
• The economic and household activities of women, their production, export activities and reproduction contributions were not being included in national accounting and so did not receive enough attention in planning, and in allocation and sharing of economic resources. With more inclusion, there could be more investment in women and girls for true national transformation; and
• Women’s tremendous demand and insistence for peace. They were the greatest victims of conflict and were not only calling for peace, but wanted more involvement in conflict resolution and peacekeeping activities.

7. She invited the media, inter alia, to:

• Study the demands of women and compare the need to the current levels of response and action;

• Review tools of information and institutional mechanisms in place for implementation of the recommendations with regard to the twelve areas of concern identified in the Beijing Platform:

• Study the texts of the commitments made and review the extent to which rhetoric has been transformed into resources and action;

• Assess the degree to which women were involved in political and economic decision making, and their access to economic and political structures;

• Upgrade the portrayals of women in the media from negative sufferers to positive actors for change;

• Lobby for access to statistical data for situational analysis and for national planning, especially to press for production and dissemination of gender-disaggregated data;

• Examine shifts and changes in concerns and actions since the Dakar and Beijing Conferences in 1994 and 1995 respectively;,

• Target the gender and women’s programmes being launched at national and regional levels;

• Assess government action and the accountability of MPs and of government institutions, NG0 and civil society action, UN action, and so on;

• Assess the level of awareness and sensitization in each county;

• Assess the level of consideration of women’s roles and concerns in each sector, and the adequacy of the resources available;

• Analyze the reasons and constraints for insufficient progress;

• Involve themselves in follow-up to the actions decided at the Conference, contained in the Regional Plan of Action and the Declaration.

8. Mr. da Costa, in his intervention, emphasized the need for the media to see themselves not only as reporters and broadcasters but also as development activists with a collective responsibility for development of Africa. Development should not be left only up to governments and the media was a powerful group that could help to influence the agenda. He deplored the negative, stereotyped way in which African women were portrayed in the international press, as refugees and victims of hunger, disease and war. Many national newspapers, in their turn, relegated women’s issues mostly to fashion and culinary pages and ignored their substantive contributions to their communities and economies. He urged truthful reporting that gives an accurate picture and announced that the lack of gender-disaggregated data would be remedied somewhat by the upcoming release by ACW of a CD-ROM, with national statistical data on women and girls in various sectors.

9. He raised a number of questions that challenged professional media policies and practices:

• Are women’s causes being advanced by media reports, or are they possibly facing a backlash?
• Is gender analysis being used to help to change stereotyped images and to recognize women’s voices and the truth about their contributions?
• Is editorial policy facilitating or neglecting coverage?
• Does policy mainstream or categorize coverage?
• Does coverage go beyond mere reporting of women’s projects and events to in-depth analysis and insistence on accountability?
• Is effort being made to employ women writers and other women media professionals?

10. Floor interventions were frank and useful and included comments on:

• Inadequate understanding of gender and gender analysis. Some journalists feel that women’s issues in Africa have not been dealt with sufficiently. Others feel that gender analysis was what showed the need for action to advance African women, to enable achievement of gender equality.

• Men are not being involved enough. Gender issues are being treated as a responsibility for women only; yet they are a vital part of the whole ethos of the Beijing Platform era. Men should be involved 100% if progress is to be made.

• Editors and producers need far more sensitization on women’s issues and tended to be mostly men. They are in a position to do a great deal to affect professional policy and practice and public opinion but very few had adopted gender analysis. Ways and means should be found to influence editors and producers on women and gender issues.

• More women producers, editors and writers are needed, and more journals and newspapers for women. Women’s pages and women’s magazines needed to be upgraded to cover more than fashion and beauty and household advice. They should also reflect conceptual and substantive issues and terms of women’s wider involvement in intellectual, legal, political and economic activities.

• Society in general needs gender sensitization and training. Attitudes towards women and women’s activities are still lagging behind the reality and world standards.

• Media professionals should strive to assess national capacity for women’s advancement and the effectiveness of institutional mechanisms and help to lobby for filling the gaps in information, accountability and structures.

• There are certain difficulties in promoting women over the public media in some countries, and of drawing attention to such harmful traditional practices as female genital mutilation, which, in the countries of the Horn particularly, affect more than 90% of women and girls. Matters of tradition and belief often obstruct exposure of certain issues and the media should take up such matters and press for change persistently.

• One way for the media to promote attitudinal change is by featuring positive, progressive female role models in the society.

• Media professionals should organize for collective action to help those colleagues whose coverage cause them to end up in jail. Because governments are not fully sensitized about freedom of expression in society, journalists faced much risk, with little protection or solidarity.

• UNHCR and IOM were particularly concerned about the undignified and degrading image of African women refugees and migrants. They were being portrayed as unfortunates, starving, full of AIDS and other diseases, prostitutes, disorganized, unable to help themselves. These images are far from the reality and neglect or ignore the resourceful, creative ways in which these women sought to better their lives. IOM commended the Ethiopian media for the recent series of stories on the abuse of migrant women workers in Gulf States, and its exposure of the larger picture of the trafficking of African women and girls as sex slaves and sex objects.  

• The UN disparity of treatment between women refugees in Kosovo and women refugees in Africa was noted. Disapproval of such unequal, discriminatory treatment of Africans by the UN was expressed. 

• UN agencies and NGOs should cooperate and collaborate with the media in a planned way, as a core function, and not just as a last minute thought for special events. Real continuous partnership, if not friendship, should be built and respected, especially between media and information officers.

• Agencies such as UNHCR, WFP and IOM that especially need the support of the media on refugees and migrants are sometimes constrained in granting media access to certain areas, not because of UN rules but due to host government policies and regulations.

• There are instances of a media backlash against women’s activities, due to general fears that women want to oust men and take over. Both men and women felt threatened by departure from tradition. A serious challenge for media professionals is how to cover women’s issues with accuracy and awareness without dangerously whipping up jealousy and resistance to advancement of women.

• Economic empowerment of women is what needs the most attention as women in broken marriages and other difficult situations cannot afford to stand-alone or become involved in decision making.

• Men, who are usually the ones in charge of everything, often hamper women’s access to and use of information quite deliberately.

• More allocation of resources is needed for women, including women media persons. There is a general lack of money and means to get funding. Government funding leaves the media less free to follow their own inclinations. Agencies and NGOs should support journalists financially, especially travel expenses, so that they can go and get the facts for themselves. They do not need spoon-feeding, merely access and financial support. Such support of the media should be seen as incentives for coverage, not as payments to carry out a public relations exercise for a particular agency or programme.

• Improved gender reporting and improved portrayal of women by the media in the new millennium will require gender sensitization and training targeted at both men and women media professionals.

• Contributions from guest writers should be encouraged and more space given to them, even though they might not be journalists, per se.

• ICTs and access to the Internet is affecting the lives of both men and women. A great deal more is now possible with accessing information, creating information resources on the Internet, and with information sharing and dissemination.

• It is since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 that ICTs have developed into such a powerful factor for speeding up change. They were barely mentioned in Beijing, but now should be taken seriously by women in their strategies and programmes.

• Interconnection with Internet information resources would help to upgrade coverage by national and community radios and television stations.

• Real commitment to change goes beyond information access and information dissemination, to communication as a two-way process.

• Language barriers are constraints, as many women, especially rural women, do not speak and read European languages. There is also the factor of dozens of local languages in one nation.

• More radio and TV for women is needed, with national and local focus, and in local languages. NGOs and the private sector should become more involved in radio and TV for women and about women and their relationships to men and to social institutions.

• Human resources are there to carry out improved coverage but African media especially, lack money and needed such support, even to travel to certain areas, or to carry out freelance work.

• Women’s involvement in media work and in information dissemination is sometimes heightened in post-conflict situations, as part of their overall involvement in reconstruction activities, In Rwanda, the genocide experience mobilized women’s involvement in print, radio and television communications for peace, reconstruction and development.

• Attention should be paid to the legal environment, for equal rights and opportunities, since law is the standard bearer of society. The UN Conventions that set global standards for the status of women should be monitored to ensure their adequate reflection in national legislation.

• The media should embark on conscious efforts to entrench gender analysis in coverage of issues. The case of Inter Press Service (IPS) was noted as a good example of increasing women’s voices in stories and as journalists in the field. The need for training in and commitment to gender analysis was also noted.

11. The moderator, Ms. Mercy Wambui, closed the meeting at around 1pm, after summarizing the main points and urging participants to come up with more collective strategies and practical ways of moving forward, "selling" and "packaging’ gender stories, often in a hostile, unsensitized and unsympathetic environment.