Kenya’s Indigenous Peoples submit a shadow report to CERD on 20th September 2024
September 27, 2024
By Ochieng’ Oreyo (Centre for Minority Rights Development)
Kenyan journalists have been asked to carefully navigate gender reporting in reducing the marginalisation of women with disability whose roles in climate change action has been muted.
People monitoring the disability ecosystem have challenged reporters and editors to change tack and tell stories of impact instead of amplifying pity or remaining blind to disability or gender language.
Are they people ‘living with disability; ‘the disabled’; or ‘the handicapped’, for example? These are some of the hard questions that experts asked reporters and editors at a sensitisation workshop on gender and climate change journalism in Nairobi.
Under the theme of Empowering Media for Inclusive Reporting: Gender Transformative Journalism fo9r Women with Disabilities and Climate Change’, they said that how newsrooms portray women with disabilities will either make life more difficult for them or enhance their abilities as agents of change.
At the two-day workshop by the Inclusive Climate Change Adaptation for a Sustainable Africa (ICCASA) and the Centre for Minority Rights Development (CEMIRIDE) from December 10, Dr John Recha, a climate scientist, explained how women bear the brunt of climate change effects that hurt their businesses, access to credit, and expose them to conflict.
“Due to their limited mobility, people with disability suffer more due to climate change effects,” said Dr Recha during the training under the Strengthening the Voices of Women with Disabilities to Actively Participate in Climate Change Policy and Negotiations (STREVOW) project funded by the African Development Bank’s ACCF.
“Climate-induced resource scarcity can increase the risk of gender-based violence, exploitation and discrimination against women with disabilities,” Dr Recha said, adding that during droughts or floods, “accessing water and food resources can put them at risk of physical or sexual abuse”.
While journalists writing “can be gender-blind,” members of the Fourth Estate had to “deliberately choose gender-transformative reporting that disrupts the convention by going beyond vulnerability and reporting how [people with disability] can be agents of change,” said Salome Owuonda, a gender expert.
“That woman in a wheelchair can still be an agent of change” through effective communication that can change behaviour when the amazing things they do are reported using the right language devoid of discrimination.
Dr Jackline Lidubwi said the PWDs are “people first” and it was inaccurate to think that “people with disability cannot talk about anything except disability”.
Limited training of journalists on disability reporting, lack of media engagement funds, and the PWDs lacking skills to engage with media effectively were some of the gaps cited as frustrating gender transformative reporting.
While hailing how some Kenyan newsrooms have created gender desks and hired gender editors and writers to cover the beat, Dr Lidubwi challenged media owners and managers to create Disability desks.
“Concerted efforts to use positive, non-judgmental respectful language when referring to people with disabilities in writing and in everyday speaking can go a long way toward helping to change negative stereotypes,” she said.
To eliminate the stereotypes, media houses ought to recognise disability as a part of human diversity; focus on strengths of people with disabilities; and, highlight the contributions of women with disabilities to climate solutions and adaptation.
Language makes or breaks, and, therefore, Dr Lidubwi said, there have been changes including dropping references such as “handicaps” and “the disabled”. Instead of “albinos”, it is safer referring to this group of people as “people with albinism” while people with hearing difficulties are more at home being referred to “the Deaf”— capital D— instead of saying or writing that “hearing impaired”.
However, the scribes cited newsroom house styles and space constraints to getting the descriptive language right, especially in headlines, but they were told to “deliberately” choose between changing tack and sticking to industry traditions.
Getting gender and disability stories right requires talking with organisations on the subject matter, having expertise within the newsrooms, balancing voices of women and men, highlighting the policy gaps, recognising the barriers women with disabilities grapple with in their climate change actions; and allowing persons with disability to say how they prefer to be identified by the media.
