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	Mama’s the word: Inside Africa’s all-female radio service by Chris Matthews New Internationalist Uganda   To celebrate World Radio Day, New Internationalist profiles the pioneers of Africa’s first all-female radio station, by Chris Matthews.   Up in the hilly district of Kisaasi, in Uganda’s capital Kampala, it is another busy day for the Mama FM team with discussions on family planning, human rights, along with international and local news all to be aired before the end of the day.   Founded by Uganda Media Women’s Association (UMWA), Mama FM is the first all-female run radio service in Africa.   The station gives a voice to young female journalists in a country where traditional gender roles often persist and shines a spotlight on underreported areas and problems impacting women’s rights.   One of those journalists is Hilda Namara. A recent journalism graduate, Namara joined the station in November and is among its team of more than 20 volunteer reporters and staff.   ‘I really felt good coming to Mama FM because I want to defend the rights of women and children,’ the 24-year-old says. ‘Here, you have to bring out something educative that can impact society and the young generation.’   The day we speak Namara has just finished producing two news bulletins for the station, including a segment on raising awareness of the Maputo Protocol – the legislation promoting human rights and women’s rights across Africa.   ‘As a women I have the right to stand up and speak out about the problems – they give us that courage at Mama FM,’ Namara says. ‘It is not like other media houses where they want catchy stories and headlines.’   The service was first launched in 2001 by Margaret Sentamu and a small group of female journalists keen to address the lack of diversity in the country’s media.   Globally, the presence of women in print, radio and television production is 37 per cent, according to the Global Media Monitoring Report 2015, while across Africa that figure is only 22 per cent.   Working for Uganda’s national radio and television services in the 1980s, Sentamu says it was rare to find many women working in such positions, something she believes stems from long-standing gender roles in society.   Although 34 per cent of parliamentary seats are occupied by women, much of Ugandan society still sees women operate domestic and household duties.   ‘Women in Uganda have been brought up to be submissive and are not expected to speak in public,’ Sentamu, UMWA’s executive director, says.   ‘In terms of the gender roles it is women who are expected to do the domestic work so you need to have 80 per cent of your time concentrated on domestic chores.’   ‘When it comes to the 8am to 5pm jobs women would rather do that because they can’t stay beyond 5pm so when bigger stories are breaking we are already at home looking after our family.’   UMWA was created in 1983 and Sentamu joined three years later with the organization focusing efforts on advocacy and raising awareness of issues faced by women in Ugandan society.   But it was while a journalism teacher in Kampala’s universities in the 1990s, where in a class of 15 only two were female, that Sentamu thought of creating a dedicated media service that put women in editorial control.   ‘We started thinking of how we can increase the voices of women in the media,’ she says. ‘[Some people think] we are not meant to do political stories or are not expected to be aggressive in journalism.’   ‘We had been working with other organizations but if you are not in charge of the editorial content you may not get the stories. So we thought the best way is to create own our own media.’   Today, the station houses two recording studios, large work spaces for its journalists and is accessible across central and southern Uganda with 90 per cent of shows in the local Luganda language.   Its programming also includes entertainment, sports and music shows but for Namara, it is the opportunity to educate and challenge traditional gender views that excites.   ‘I love the way things are done here especially in the news department,’ she says. ‘I know my journalism is not for nothing,   ‘I know I can help out a child, a lady or any vulnerable people that are suffering through my work. As media, we can create impact.’   The station has both male and female journalists and programme coordinator Catherine Apalat says through its promotion of female voices the service shows the need for a balanced media in the country, while at the same time breaking down stereotypes.   ‘We aim to mainstream issues in our programming,’ Apalat says. ‘It is not all about the problems that women face. Women do not live in an island and men have to know these issues so that they are able to live in peace.’   UMWA, which also conducts rural outreach programs, now boasts more than 180 members and with internships and enrollment at universities on the rise, improvements are being made.   Today, there are many female news personalities in the country with the likes of Barbara Kajai, editor-in-chief of nationwide media house Vision Group and Monitor Publications’ managing director Carol Beyana helping close the gender gap.   But many still believe progress is slow. Nankwanga Eunice Kasirye, a former editor at NBS Television and now Uganda coordinator for the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT), says more needs to be done to promote gender equality from a young age.   ‘I am a feminist, I want to see more women in the limelight but there is this cultural brainwash that women cannot break through,’ she says.   ‘It starts from the schools and homes where we come from. Girls should be mentored that they have equal potential and they grow up with an open mind.’   And while she says the number of women pursuing journalism careers has increased, there remains a lack of opportunity in newsrooms across the country.   ‘We want people’s’ mindset to change,’ she adds. ‘So in a period of five years we have a generation of strong media ladies and have a ripple effect of the generations that come after.’   ‘All the men in positions of management we need to involve them so we can build a generation of media that is respected regardless of sex.’   IAWRT recently launched a mentorship programme for aspiring journalists and Mama FM continues to have a steady stream of interns – 75 per cent of whom must be women – while in May the station will host the first Gender Media Awards in Uganda.   Sentamu, whose own daughter is embarking on a journalism career, admits that while funding is a hurdle, the Mama FM team remain committed to championing gender equality in the media and Ugandan society at large.   ‘We are not-for-profit, so it does not belong to me for example but to the women’s movement,’ she says, ‘We founded it, we manage it and we are not ready to let it go.’   And for Hilda Namara, who has her reporting sights set on issues of land ownership and inheritance rights for women over the coming weeks, Mama FM’s pioneering role in Ugandan media is as strong as ever.   ‘I am really proud to be a journalist,’ she says. ‘As a young journalist I know it is important to me to be a voice to the voiceless and be an ear to those people.’ http://bit.ly/2mrvMZt   http://www.achpr.org/instruments/women-protocol/ http://bit.ly/2mD2pEb Visit the related web page
	The status quo is not working for most people by Uffe Elbæk Denmark   We live in an era of inequality and face catastrophic climate change. But there is an alternative, says Danish politician Uffe Elbæk.   We live in challenging times. Our settled ways of life are deteriorating; the systems we have built and the ecosystems we rely on are collapsing.   The very limits of the planet we inhabit are being tested in front of our eyes; not just by corporations but by how we ourselves care for our environment. Those are the facts. How we react individually, and formulate our responses collectively, will determine how history sees us; how we manage to change will determine history itself.   As I see it, and as more and more people are seeing it, staying with the status quo is not an option. A few facts to illustrate my point, 62 individuals own half of the planet’s wealth, 65 million people are refugees and estimates show these numbers could at least double in the near future; and we are on a path towards catastrophic climate change expected to displace hundreds of millions, and cause rapid desertification on land, acidification in our seas, erosion of our shorelines and more frequent extreme and dangerous weather events across the globe. It is too late to outsource responsibility for these problems; we have to start with ourselves.   That’s what we did when we founded The Alternative (Alternativet in Danish) in 2013. We had the audacity to imagine a radically different future: greener and more sustainable; full of hope and equal opportunities; a future that lives up to the full potential of humanity coming together. Three years later, after the Brexit referendum, with the popularity of Trump in the US, and the continuing collapse of European leadership, the need for radical solutions is even greater. Our sense of an alternative way of responding to breakdown is growing. And, as history tells us, there is always an alternative.   Lessons from the past   Denmark went bankrupt in 1813. After wars we did not win, and after the nation’s capital was bombarded and left in rubble by the British and there was no money left, we did something courageous and perhaps unexpected. We invested. Massively. And we put education at the core. In doing so, we laid the foundation for a golden age of art, ideas, democratic values and an unprecedented bloom of social innovation.   Attending school was made mandatory and free for all children across the land. Inspired by thinkers and social movements from across the world, adults educated themselves  in the folk high schools that offered non formal education, while farmers united in cooperatives and workers formed unions. We created communities and ways of organising ourselves that in turn inspired others around the globe. As we built the welfare state, as we continued to invest heavily in education, healthcare and equality, and as we furthered our civil rights, riding high on a continuous wave of innovation, we secured better lives for most, if not all. Danes benefited. They lived well. Better than before the crisis.   But with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, with the dominance in recent years of austerity, we started becoming enslaved by the economy rather than using the economy as a means to achieve greater things. Parallel to this, it seemed, societies stagnated. As a whole, we got richer (mainly the rich got richer), but we did not get happier, we did not show more empathy and we certainly did not get wiser. Somehow we became disconnected from the meaning and purpose of our work and entered into a trance of achievement and procurement. We got stressed out, and those who could not keep up had to work more jobs to make ends meet. We did not have the time to care for our parents or our children. In an effort to create economic growth, to buy the next iPhone, to get a bigger house, we lost track of what should be most important to us.. We became too passive. Or numb, maybe. Even lost, perhaps. In our approach to society building, we became conservative.   In our approach to politics we for the most part got satisfied with preserving the status quo. We were so happy about what we achieved (and yes, we achieved great things) that we stopped dreaming big, stopped rethinking. Instead of changing, renewing and improving, we focused on safeguarding. What a waste of potential and ambition. We set aside the greater vision.   A wave of innovation   That is why we founded The Alternative; to start a wave of innovation like the one that kick started our progress in the past; to create an arena where dreaming comes naturally; an arena where new ideas are encouraged and where dreaming out loud, with your eyes and ears open, is appreciated.   Today, as it was when it was founded, The Alternative is a value based movement; a platform for progressives of all sorts and starting points, one that is not blinded by ideologies of the past. On this platform, we plan to build great things: sustainable communities; solar energy projects; urban gardens; publishing companies. We started by building a political party. This might sound like an oddly familiar place to start, but The Alternative is not your regular political party.   Our political programme is 100% crowdsourced through ‘political laboratories’, open to all and held throughout Denmark after our launch in 2013.   Our politics and policies are not formed by special interest groups; they are measured against how well they perform on three bottom lines: the economic bottom line, the social bottom line and the environmental bottom line. A good proposal will create surpluses on all three.   A proposal that creates a surplus on the economic bottom line alone is not something we would endorse. On top of that, everything we do is guided by our six core values: transparency, generosity, humility, courage, empathy and humour. That means that we do not practise politics in the way that it is usually done. Since we were elected to the Danish Parliament last year, we have insisted on doing things differently: reading poems as part of our policy proposal in our equivalent to the House of Commons; throwing Alternative Parliaments that involve inviting citizens affected by the laws being debated in chambers to have a synchronised debate in a room next door; and inviting artists to work by our side, acting as creative disturbances.   We are deeply serious about what we do, about the radically different future we want, and about the real and sustainable transition that we want to drive forward as fast as possible. And we insist on doing it differently because the way we have been doing things up till now is what has got us into this mess.   A new political culture   Most revolutionary of all, at least to the system, has been our insistence on a new political culture. Media, fellow politicians and the public in general have been stunned by our refusal to participate in the blame game of politics, our commitment to stopping the name-calling and our readiness to be curious and non-judgemental about the position of a political opponent. When we are proposing new initiatives, we lay out the pros and cons, we acknowledge the grey areas and admit when we were wrong or have changed our minds. In most walks of life that would be totally normal. In politics, not so much.   When we spin, we are open about it. We publish media declarations on our website, chronicling how we talk to journalists on specific stories that we place in the media, what our considerations are and what we aim to achieve.   These approaches are certainly new, at least by Danish standards. And against all odds, or more precisely against the odds of media pundits and their low expectations, we have been successful. We got elected to parliament in our first try last year, have experienced rising polls ever since and our membership base is now fourth among the nine political parties in the Danish Parliament.   I believe this success (and the success of other new parties like ours) has many causes. First of all, many people are tired of the old version of politics (a large percentage of our membership base has never been politically active before). Second, we address other problems and have radically different solutions than most other parties. Third, we have proven that politics can be fun, inclusive, thought-provoking and action-orientated for all.   Fourth, and most important to us at least, we want change. We are not satisfied with the status quo. Why should we be when the status quo is not working for most people?   Instead of focusing on austerity alone, we see the real challenge as the empathy crisis, the systems crisis and the climate crisis. And our responses are action orientated. So, for example, we want our agricultural industry to go 100% organic; we want experiments with basic income for all; we want a 30-hour work week to give people more time for themselves and each other; we want all our energy to come from renewable sources by 2040 or before; we want to phase out fossil fuel cars by 2025; and we want to stop using GDP as the most prominent indicator of the progress we make.   Most of all, we want to establish new economic thinking that makes sense on an international scale and can replace the blind trust that most politicians have in economic growth as the only solution.   Each of the three crises indicates the potential for change; the potential to renew our society as we did in 1813. We welcome the chance to build new, sustainable systems that respect the planet’s limits, that prioritise wellbeing over wealth, and that further civil participation by and for the people. If we fail to do so, we don’t deserve any better. Visit the related web page
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