The United Nations has appealed to Nigerian media to champion women’s rights and gender equality issues through editorials, features, and news articles.
The UN Women Representative to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Beatrice Eyong, made this known at an event organised by the UN Women and Women Radio, with support from the Canadian Government .
The event is titled ‘Media Executive National Dialogue on Gender Responsive Reporting’.
Mrs Eyong pleaded with the media to ensure the production of high-quality stories with a focus on gender equality and women’s rights, with a minimum of two per month.
She also explained that the media should ensure the inclusion of women as sources in stories produced, aiming for gender parity, across diverse subjects such as business, technology, science, and engineering.
Mrs Eyong noted that the UN Women will support the Nigerian media through capacity-building for media reporters and practitioners, as well as establishing yearly media award on gender-responsive reporting.
The UN chief further explained that gender-responsive decision-making, enable equality in the newsrooms by ensuring women journalists are given similar opportunities as their male colleagues and can cover diverse subjects from politics to business, science, sports, and technology, while encouraging male journalists to also cover diverse issues, including women’s rights and gender equality stories.
However, the UN agency is also proposing bi-annual media coordination meetings on gender reporting, support exchange and lesson learned programme within the region.
On the other has, the International Press Centre (IPC) research has it that the Nigerian media have disproportionately represented issues relating to women in their coverage, compared to men.
The Executive Director of the IPC Lanre Arogundade, described the trend of gender reporting in 2018/2019 was not different from that of 2014/2015 based on the findings of the performance scorecard in relation to women.
Share this
