Making Every Voice Count

The launch of SAGEM followed a 2-day workshop on the South African Gender and Media Baseline Study (GMBS) in Auckland Park that benchmarked how women are covered and treated in and by South African media. Three organisations conducted the South African study: The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), which advocates freedom of expression in the region, Gender Links, a southern African NGO that promotes gender equality in and through the media, and the Media Monitoring Project. The research formed part of a broader study covering 12 countries in Southern Africa.

In response to the study findings, and under the banner "Making every voice count", the SAGEM network met in September 2003 to focus on strategies to ensure that women are seen and heard in the elections. The network consists of over 20 organisations involved in media training, analysis, and advocacy, as well as several gender-related NGOs. The South African National Editors Forum (SANEF) also outlined plans to ensure greater gender balance in media coverage following an annual general meeting devoted to this subject in June 2003. SANEF indicated its desire to work closely with civil society groups and SAGEM in its "corrective action" plans.

Programme activities and strategies will include the following:

• Mount a public awareness campaign on the findings of the GMBS that will include workshops with community organisations, schools, and mainstream media. Key findings will be translated into different languages and distributed as pamphlets that will include actions that communities can take to ensure that voices of women are heard.
• Develop a year-long calendar of events around which activists can engage with the media on coverage of gender issues beyond Women's Day on August 9. This includes the Sixteen Days of Activism Against gender violence in November/December and the upcoming elections. The next meeting of SAGEM in September 2003 specifically focussed on strategies for ensuring that women's voices are heard in the elections.
• Establish a rapid response alert system that will enable members to send in complaints on sexist reporting, as well as record cases of gender-aware reporting.
• Extend the GMBS research to areas and genres of the media that could not be covered in the first study, and conduct specific monitoring of such issues as gender and the elections.
• Participate in the Global Gender and Media Monitoring Project in 2005 that will provide a further benchmarking opportunity.
• Work with media training institutions in ensuring that gender is incorporated into training curricula.
• In partnership with SANEF, engage with media practitioners and managers at the newsroom level and in workshops that SANEF has planned to raise awareness on gender and the media.
• Work with SANEF in conducting an audit of existing policies that guide the media and help to develop a template and checklist for gender policies in media institutions.
• Make a submission to the SABC on gender and the transformation of the SABC from a national to a public broadcaster.
• Convene a workshop for statutory and regulatory authorities such as the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA), ICASA, the Advertising Standards Authority, Press Ombudsman, and the Broadcast Complaints Authority to share the findings of the study and gain an understanding of how they incorporate gender into their work.

SAGEM will form part of the Southern African Gender and Media Network to be launched at a regional summit in 2004, where organisations will report back on their action plans and share best practices.

Rights, Women, Gender, Media, Political Development.

The GMBS study revealed that black women in South Africa, who constitute 45% of the population, account for only 5% of news sources. Overall, women in the country constitute only 19% of all news sources. According to the study, black women account for only 6% of South African media workers.