A renowned Ghanaian Gender Equality advocate and expert, Dr. Charity Binka, has called on stakeholders pushing the Women, Peace and Security agenda to engage the media more strategically for its advancement.
Dr. Binka took her turn on FOSDA’s Talk Women Peace and Security Series dubbed Talk WPS to share her personal and professional experience on how the Media has contributed to the WPS Agenda. The discussion also focused primarily on how the media can be used more effectively to promote the participation of women in Peace and Security processes. Talk WPS is a FOSDA intervention aimed at educating and sensitising women and the general public on the Women Peace and Security Agenda.
The September edition of Talk WPS which was held on the 30th day of the month, was on the topic “Promoting Women, Peace and Security: Journalistic perspectives”.
During the conversation, Dr. Binka, who is the Executive Director of WOMEC, questioned how stakeholders have been engaging the media on the issues of Women, Peace and Security. According to Dr. Binka, the discourse on media’s engagement with United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR 1325) which is the framework on which the WPS agenda stands, had been buried for far too long considering the fact that the resolution has been around for 22 years. She insisted the media must be actively engaged to achieve the desired results. For Dr. Binka, active journalism meant “not just covering events, but how to go behind the scenes to be able to get the issues that really affect people particularly women and other vulnerable groups.” It also meant “getting involved in key issues and advocating for change that we need.”
In her opening remarks, she recalled some initiatives in 2014 and 2015 that were great for getting the media involved in the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. These included, some forums to train journalists on WPS and on ‘media engagement strategy’ organised by KAIPTC’s Women, Peace and Security Institute at that time. But according to her, since then, the commitment to purposefully engage the media for the promotion of WPS in Ghana by journalists and development workers had dwindled.
As an example, Dr. Binka used the Ghana National Action Plan (GHANAP 2) which is an instrument created by government to promote women’s inclusion in peace and security matters. She stated that GHANAP 2 fails to explicitly capture the media and journalists as stakeholders in promoting women’s relevance and contribution to peace and security matters. “If the journalists have not seen GHANAP 2, how would they even buy into it?” She said.
From her perspective as an experienced journalist, she believes that equipped with the necessary skills, journalists and media practitioners will play a vital role in monitoring the implementation of the WPS agenda in Ghana. Following this, the session ended on some key recommendations shared by Dr. Binka.
Firstly, she encouraged the proper establishment of relationships between stakeholders pushing the Women, Peace and Security agenda and journalists. She insisted that they work more with journalists instead of just dealing with them as instruments for broadcasting workshops and forums. She said that journalists and media practitioners are also part of society so including them as participants or stakeholders in such meetings is important for them to understand and grasp the issues.
She also suggested that having a media strategy in program planning and implementation was good to promote women in peace and security. According to her, this means that in writing proposals and budgets, there should be an intentional and deliberate addition of media engagements in programming from inception to end for them to effectively tell the narrative. This means being willing to fund journalists to go to the field to follow stories and write on these stories that would promote WPS. Dr. Binka voiced that “Journalists must go behind the scenes and get the information.”
In addition to this, she said translating the resolution into local languages especially for advertising on the radio was an innovative way of grabbing the attention of more media practitioners. She encouraged development workers and advocates of finding other innovative ways of grabbing the attention of the media because they are often busy telling other topical stories.
Just as importantly, to address the silence of media on Women, Peace and Security, advocates of WPS should have a collective voice, they should research on all things WPS within their communities to produce advocacy documents to draw the attention of the media. She called all to action to influence lasting change for women and girls. According to her, “if we refuse to rock the boat, the boat will rock us. The boat of insecurity, lack of protection, abuse and gender-based violence.”