International Development Journalism Competition: Silence speaks
Training in filmmaking and journalism is empowering women across rural Africa to find their voice and articulate their own development agendas.
Twenty seven year old Doreen squats amongst a group of women in a field in Samfya, Zambia. With the youngest of her four children tied to her back she works diligently and with intense concentration.
Usually Doreen and the women she is working with do not elicit so much as a second glance but today they are attracting quite a crowd. This is because rather than the dusty pick she would normally wield Doreen is holding a digital video camera, whilst another woman beside her is intently repositioning a sound boom. They are making a film about the impact of early marriage on their community and are in the process of interviewing one of the many mothers in their village.
Doreen explains, "Some of us were sold off by our parents as young as 12 years old but now our group is teaching people to stop marrying children off so early".
Doreen is a member of the Samfya Women Filmmakers Collective, a project set up by the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) to train women living in extreme poverty in the art of filmmaking, with the aim of improving education. So far CAMFED have trained 45 women who have collectively produced 155 films and radio broadcasts in Zambia and Ghana, covering topics from maternal health to HIV/AIDs and access to education for women and girls.
"I never went to school so I did not learn how to read and write", explains Doreen, "but I have learned many things from the group. This is the first time that women here have gone against tradition, but together we now have the strength to bring about great change."
Like many thousands of women across rural Africa, the majority of the trainees are illiterate and have never been to school. Reasons for their lack of schooling include poverty, negative attitudes towards educating girls within their community, early marriage and the fear of violence. As a result these women have spent much of their lives in silence, constrained by low paying jobs, forced into early marriage and motherhood and deprived of the freedom to control their own lives. Indeed, according to UNAIDS, illiterate women are four-times more likely to marry early and not know how to prevent HIV infection, whilst girls with higher levels of education tend marry later, have fewer children and are more likely to insist their partner use a condom.
But within the Samfya Women Filmmakers Collective women's lives are slowly changing. Through the use of cameras, they are overcoming their lack of education, learning practical technical skills and harnessing their natural ability to communicate, articulating and debating the issues that affect their communities. CAMFED's Founder and Director, Ann Cotton, explains, "Our goal is to empower women to tell their stories and share them with the world. We give them a voice, a set of skills and a sense of confidence so that they can connect with their communities, their countries and beyond".
According to CAMFED, instilling a sense of confidence in their own voice has had an incredibly positive impact on the women's personal development, encouraging them to seek further education, send their own daughters to school and speak out against inequality. But the value of the project does not stop there. The women of Samfya are also given a platform to become advocates for change in their wider communities, screening their films in their own and surrounding villages as well as posting them online, projecting their voices farther and wider than they ever imagined possible.
Doreen beams, "Our group has brought a lot of good progress to us here in Samfya. When we screen our films we are teaching the community about important issues, such as early marriage and HIV. We are bringing progress to our community through film."
The benefits of media training for women in the developing world do not end at the boundaries of local communities. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congolese radio reporter Franchou Namegabe Nabintu, or Chouchou, has been using radio journalism to spread a powerful global message about violence against women, an issue that mars the lives of so many in her country.
A recent report by the American Journal of Public Health estimated nearly 2 million women have been raped in the DRC, with one woman victimised every minute. Driven by a desire to raise global awareness about the pervasive and damaging impact this form of violence has on development, Chouchou has been using her hard-hitting radio reports, which include the testimonies of rape victims, to speak to policy makers and opinion leaders around the world. In fact, her work has been responsible for convincing the International Court of Justice in the Hague to declare rape a weapon of war and led Hilary Clinton to denounce the perpetrators as war criminals.
Having seen how powerful the media can be as a tool for tackling the various issues that are keeping so many women in extreme poverty, Chouchou also set up the South Kivu Women's Media Association (AFEM). AFEM provides basic journalism training for rural women in DRC, teaching them to use the media to tell their stories and speak out against the inequality that rules their lives.
"I started AFEM in an environment where women were being raped and sexually abused, so I decided to use the microphone as a weapon."
Whilst many warn that we are a long way from achieving Millennium Development Goal 3, to promote gender equality and empower women in the developing world, the examples set by women like Chouchou and projects such as AFEM and the Samfya Women Filmmakers Collective prove that genuine empowerment and positive change is within reach.
Cameras and microphones are allowing the silenced to speak and enabling women to steer the debates around the development of their communities.
As Doreen puts it, "Now I can stand up and speak to many people and say all I have to say."
This feature was written for the Guardian International Development Journalism competition before 13 June 2011.