Chukwu David 
Journalists across the nation’s media landscape have resolved to help enhance greater women’s participation in politics in the country through the instrumentality of sustained dialogue between women in politics and the media.
The media practitioners made the resolution in Abuja at the end of a one-day gender-sensitive reporting training for key media personnel to support women and ensure they adequately participate in politics
The training was organised by Kimpact Development Initiative (KDI) with support from Women’s Democracy Network, a women empowerment flagship initiative of the International Republic Institute (IRI), under the Supporting Advancement of Gender Equality project on Tuesday, June 13th 2023.
According to the communique issued by the organisers in conjunction with participants, the aim of the training was to develop the capacity of media personnel on approaches and methods of gender-sensitive reporting to support women’s political leadership.
The training which was held at the Corinthia Villa Hotels, Abuja, brought together 27 media personnel including reporters from broadcast, online and print media, as well as political reporters, State House correspondents and editors from public and private media outlets in Nigeria.
The journalists resolved to use a gender lens in reportage on women’s political leadership, as well as use key messaging and tailor specific messages to adequately capture the perspectives of women in politics, amplify their voices and build popular support for them.
They also resolved to conduct more research and utilize data to enhance gender-responsive reporting, just as they agreed to deploy new strategies to execute their work; engage in gender-sensitive reporting, write more local stories, and provide the human angle to reports.
Moreover, the media professionals decided to set up strategies to verify the information to prevent erroneous reports caused by failure of verification that could act as push-backs to women’s political participation.
The newsmen who were drawn from the print, electronic and online media platforms, also resolved to recognise the barriers that women in politics encounter and use a gender lens to effectively capture their perspectives.
Furthermore, they resolved to capture stakeholders’ perspectives and give more prominence to women in politics, and also
provide platforms such as dedicated radio programs to support women in political leadership.
During the training, participants observed that there were gaps in media reportage on women’s political participation in Nigeria, stressing the need for the media to positively portray women in politics through reportage to highlight the value that women could offer.
They also observed that the demand to push out and publish in real-time could lead to the inadvertent sharing of disinformation and misinformation or material from spurious sources.
The participants observed further that there was a lack of sufficient manpower by most media houses to conduct gender-sensitive reporting and focus on women in politics.
Also, they observed that Media personnel do encounter setbacks in engaging and getting perspectives of women in politics because of the reluctance of women in politics to feature in the media.
Similarly, the media professionals observed that balancing between social justice and profits for media was a common challenge in the media industry.
They observed a disconnect between the media and women in political participation, which affects media coverage of women in political participation.
