I arrived with 3 other Association for
Progressive Communications Africa Women project (AAW) delegates on
Monday morning to attend the Highway Africa conference in a raining
Grahamstown, South Africa.
I looked at the conference programme for Highway Africa and saw that
only 11 female speakers were listed out of fifty. This was very
disappointing – especially since Highway has been criticized in the
past because of the lack of women represented among speakers and
chairpeople. It’s an improvement, but not by much!
In today’s Open Source publication, the headline “Be assertive to have
a gender sensitive HA!” made me shake my head. Last year, women
protested the lack of women speakers – this was obviously not
“assertive” enough for the conference orgnisers. The statement implies
that the reason for the non-appearance of women on the agenda is, well,
our fault. It’s because we are too demure and coy.
Chris Kabwato is quoted as saying that “HA’s policy is to be gender
balanced in everything it does”. He then goes on to put the
responsibility of equal representation on women – not very gender
balanced. Perhaps I can offer the training services of my organisation
to elaborate on what it means to be gender balanced.
If the conference had only 11 black speakers among fifty, would Chris
Kabwato be asking black journalists to be more assertive in asking for
equal representation? Would we even be here this year, sitting in
sessions obediently listening to funders and CEOs tell us about media
in Africa?
I don’t need to demand my rights from HA – I have rights. It is not my
responsibility to make HA gender balanced, but the organizers'. There
are many female movers and shakers in the media sector in Africa, we
are in the minority, yes, but HA could play a role in challenging the
status quo. Judging from this year’s topics and discussions,
challenging the status quo is not what HA is about.
Look, here I am, being assertive.
Responses to this post
If you would like to speak or present a workshop at Highway Africa Conference 2007 please let me know. Be assured we try hard to ask people to come on board. As people like Muthoni Wanyeki, Aida Opoku-Mensah, Anriette Esterhuysen...If the good people are invited and they cannot make what should I do? Ask yourself why the many women we approach are unable to make it to the conference? To reduce my efforts at making Highway Africa more representative to the statement "be more asserive" is rather unfortunate. Dig deeper into our past conferences and our efforts to date.
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