"First, this strategy is a women’s empowerment strategy, confirming our commitment to women and girls all over the world, by identifying objectives and activities to operationalize our stated goals to: Ensure safe access to information for women, girls and marginalized groups in some of the worldâ...€™s most challenging places; Support women’s empowerment by building their leadership in the media, information and communications technology fields; and Improve the information we all consume by promoting more stories produced by, for and about women and girls. But, as we believe gender equality to be inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity, this strategy is also a gender equality strategy, helping move us forward as an organization to lay the groundwork for a more expansive inclusion strategy. Recognizing the different cultures in which we work, we aim to be as gender transformative as possible within each country context, addressing the underlying causes of gender inequality and discrimination as we are able, doing all we can to provide diverse groups access to the information they need, and ensuring women, girls and other gender identities are portrayed fairly in media outputs. This strategy recognizes gender equality as broader than equity between women and men and sets out specific and targeted actions required to ensure that all individuals have access not just to equal opportunities, but equal outcomes in the workplace and in programs." (Introduction)
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"In the 1990s following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in Germany and the death of Apartheid in South Africa, several cross-national initiatives were undertaken in Africa to strengthen the role of the media in nascent democracies. Some 30 years later, several of these initiatives are dead while the... surviving ones are on the brink of folding. This discussion takes a critical historic synopsis by exploring the conjectural and chronological foundations for such media initiatives, in particular, in the Southern African Development Community [MISA, SAMDEF and NSJ Centre]. It concludes that while much was accomplished, these foreign-inspired endeavours are no longer valid, useable or germane and ought to be abandoned. That way, Africa shall define its own urgencies, priorities and destiny without the external stimulus." (Abstract)
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