By DOH JAMES SONKEY
A Network of media professionals known as “Gender Data Journalists” has been hatched to mainstream gender data in Cameroon and Africa. The Network headed by Emmanuel Batake of The Spark Newspaper as pioneer National Coordinator and Obah Rosaline of CBS Radio in Bamenda as Vice National Coordinator was put in place after an election last May 24, 2019 at Mbalmayo in the Centre region, at the end of a two-day workshop to empower media practitioners on ways of integrating gender in data analysis.
Other pioneer Executive Members include, Alexandra Tchuileu of Cameroon Tribune as Secretary General, Nadege Bowa of Le Messager Newspaper as Financial Officer and Michelle Nya Nyangue of CRTV National Station as Communication Officer.
The Network whose creation was facilitated by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, UN Women through its flagship programme “Making Every Woman and Girl Count” (MEWGC) has as mission to highlight and promote gender aspects in data analysis that could stimulate policy makers to pay more attention to gender issues during decision-making.
Making Every Woman and Girl Count is a programme that aims at improving the production and use of gender disaggregated statistics for data localization and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The workshop it should be recalled sought to look at ways of making gender statistics available and accessible and analysed to inform policy making, advocacy and accountability for delivering gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Thus, experts from UN Women, the National Institute of Statistics and the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and the Family all promised to facilitate access of the network to gender data for better exploitation and dissemination.
The Mbalmayo gathering ended with the executive and members taking commitments to get to work immediately after validating a triennial roadmap targeting various stakeholders and institutions in a bid to foster gender equality.