The Global Media Monitoring Project Award Nomination

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) will be 10 years old in 2005 and while numerous gender and communication activists, policy makers and academics have over the years recognized the importance of GMMP as a tool for change, to date there has been no formal recognition of the project. All that changed at the end of last year when the nominations committee of the Feminist Scholarship Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) selected GMMP as their nominatation for the ICA award of Most Important Applied/ Public Policy Research Programme. Karen Ross (University of Coventry) in the UK, was then responsible for putting the nomination package together on behalf of FSD.

... or how I learned to embrace feminism and accept my place in the awkward squad

Ten years ago, in 1994, I embarked on what was to become a significant research interest for me when I decided to monitor the media’s portrayal of the contest for the leadership of the British Labour Party, a contest provoked by the sudden death of the then leader, John Smith.

Over 22 millions people have died of AIDS related illnesses in the last 20 years and more than 42 million people are currently infected with a virus which was unknown in 1980 (UNAIDS 2002). While HIV/AIDS is the largest health issue currently facing the world, the epidemic is a gender issue. Statistics prove that both the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS is not random.

Prompted by the desire to promote the positive role the mass media can play in relation to gender and development concerns and to share experiences with two the neighbouring countries of Laos and Cambodia, the Research Centre for Gender, Family and Environment in Development (CGFED) and Vietnamese Info Youth Centre organised a workshop on gender, media and development in Vietnam.

Among the least visible issues in the media today is poverty. It was with this in mind that WACC convened a panel on communication and poverty as part of the World Forum on Communication Rights (WFCR), a one-day event held alongside the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva in December of last year.

Inclusion, Diversity and Gender Equity.
Since preparations for the WSIS began in 2002, there have been a large number of networks and organizations, many of them WACC partners, working to ensure that gender equality and women’s rights are integral to the WSIS process, documents and outcomes.

Over the last two years, WACC’s Global Studies Programme has organised a series of workshops in Africa on Refugees’ Right to Communicate. The series culminated in the publication of a call to action summarising the key findings of the workshops. Here, Valérie Gatabazi highlights critical gender issues in relation to the situation of refugees, based on the presentation she gave at one of the workshops which took place in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The issues are universal and call for urgent redress, especially with regard to the situation of women and girls in refugee camps.