In order to mentor female students in the schools of journalism, the Women In Media Platform (WMP) met students of journalism at Mount Kenya university this Thursday 22th 2022.
The purpose of the meeting was to mentor, train future female journalist to cover stories related to the politics and share technics of interviewing political figures as explained by Akalikumutima Regine, the chairperson of WMP.
She added that WMP wants to increase the number of female journalist who will cover hard and constructive stories in the future and that needs to prepare them so that they can be ready to take up the task in the media profession.
Rushingabigwi Jean Bosco, the Head of the Department for Media Sector Coordination Monitoring at Rwanda Governance Board (RGB), gave his opening remarks full of encouragement to the young ladies who intend to join Media.
He also advise them to understand the Rwanda politics, policies and respect the law related to the Media but also do their job independently without harming any person intentionally.
“Every profession can have some complications. That means you need to be prepared to face this challenges and use better technics to solve the problems that you will meet in this career.” Rushingabigwi said.
Gender activist and member of WMP Diane Mushimiyimana talked about how female journalist can be confident in reporting and analyzing political news.
Brigitte Uwamaliya, an expert in Media and renown female journalist who conducts community debates, explained the challenges journalists can met in the field and how to sort out of this challenges.
“Preparing before, read a lot of documents related to your topic, having an angle and being objective can help you to gather information you want from any field,” Uwamaliya advised.
The training was full of discussions on student’s side and mentors from WMP and students promise this platform to be good journalists and make different when they will join journalism professional.
This meeting with young female students of journalism comes against the backdrop that the numbers of female journalists in Rwanda remains small compared to their male counterparts.
Different assessment on Media in Rwanda show that this because of different obstacles, like gender discrimination, sexual harassment and less pay compare to the men in the same position.
