A pool for women to have a voice in Beijing + 10
María Suárez Toro, WMP
The web-page of the Women’s Media Pool (WMP) is a virtual conglomerate of women’s media, comprised of 31 networks or organizations that have come together to pool their different initiatives in order to disseminate - by all means and throughout the world - the proceedings of Beijing + 10.
The WMP will work between February 28 and March 11 during the 49th Session in New York, of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which will assess the 10 year implementation of the Platform for Action of the IV World Conference on Women in Beijing, China.
The web-page has become an electronic resource to articulate and strengthen information gathering and its distribution through community and commercial radio, internet radio, television, written and electronic newspapers and multimedia dialogues among women in N.Y. and those back home that want to follow the process. The WMP will produce information in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese, from and to all continents of the globe.
Women journalists and communicators in the pool will be there in every room in the United Nations building, gathering the ignored voices of women that are not heard in a balanced way in conventional media, according to updated UNESCO Reports.
Coordinated by the International Women’s Tribune Center (IWTC), they will also organize their own effort to lobby for the evaluation of Section “J” of the Platform about women and the media. They will also cover the campaigns that women will launch in the streets and in media on the 8th of March, International Women’s Day, such as the World March of Women’s launching of the Women’s Charter for Humanity and Code Pink’s marches and manifestations “against the sexist and militaristic policy of the Bush Administration.”
Journalists and media practitioners will also disseminate information about the launching of the Campaign for the Eradication of Poverty by the Association Women and Development (AWID) and “Beijing and Beyond”, an accountability Campaign by The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) and other networks.
The Women’s Network of the World Association of Community Radios (AMARC) will do a 24 hour global broadcast together with the World March of Women, also on March 8. That day, FIRE will webcast an 8 hour program that will take place in different parts of the world, also linking its program with AMARC´s
Utilizing interactivity in real time in the Internet, the African Gender and Media (GEM) will hold daily “cyberdialogues” that will link women in New York with women back in their countries. FIRE will join the cyberdialogues by webcasting them in its Internet radio station.
Digitallfuture and GEM/Gender Links will also produce newspapers in electronic and paper format.
The APC women have organized a series of panel presentations about women and media, especially ICTs, that are relevant not only to the Beijing + 10, but also to the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to take place in Tunis this year.
The Women’s Media Pool will also showcase the evolution of women’s media in the last decade since the IV Women’s Conference in Beijing, that is, women’s media that have been born in this after that date, like CIMAC´s women’s press agency, FIRE´s internet radio station, specialized electronic networks like WRHnet and “En la Mira” by ISIS International in Chile, and women’s newspapers such as Digitallfuture and GEM´s.
Also included in the rebirth are women’s monitoring groups such as Asia Pacifica Women’s Watch, a suitcase radio such as FEMLINK in the Fiji Islands and women’s electronic magazines like “Women” in Cuba and “Mujer Salud” of the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network.
It is also a pool that will also showcase how women’s activist organizations and networks have embraced the Internet and electronic communications to transcend strict specialization in media, assuming their own information and communication work as their exercise of the human right to communicate consecrated in the international human rights framework. Many organizations and networks in the pool no not do media as such, but will distribute the Pool’s productions and will help position them in media in their countries.
So far the pool has achieved the following: joined language groups, linked regions in media activities, provided sharing of infrastructure for the media work, identified common objectives of the pool, created a virtual information pool, distributed information about women’s media initiatives at Beijing + 10, created a web page of the pool, raised awareness about section “J” of the Platform for Action about Women and Media, joined women journalists and communicators in their countries with women at the United Nations who are participating in the process, and raised awareness in the U.N. Department of Public Information about the Women’s Media Pool.
Every day during the CSW Beijing + 10 proceedings, the international audience will find in www.womensmediapool.org the tittles of every press release, report and feature produced by the Pool’s participants, with a link the web pages where they will be able to read, hear or see the full reports.
For more information you can write to femmediapool@yahoo.com