Women traders graduate!

Future media practitioners are not the only Southern African citizens benefiting from GL’s media literacy course.

From October 2010 to January 2011, GL extended its gender and media literacy course to women traders based in the Johannesburg region. The traders work with ESSET, a local NGO that strives to address poverty through economic empowerment of women. The traders learned about women’s representation in the media and how to work with, and use, media, including how to produce brochures and business cards.

Some of the women were interviewed by community radio stations about issues that affect women traders, including gender based violence. Some also opened e-mail accounts for the first time. The 19 women graduated on International Women’s Day and the graduation coincided with a GMDC seminar under the banner “Decent work, Decent Lives”. The seminar was hosted in partnership with the Ecumenical Service for Socio-Economic Transformation (ESSET) which works with informal traders and the Let Us Grow project, a community based organisation for care workers.

The same event was also the official inauguration of the Enough is Enough Campaign. The Campaign will advocate for stronger laws to end gender-based violence and it urges women and men to speak out about issues of GBV in their homes and communities. Many of the women traders took the opportunity to write about their own experiences using the Gender Links Facebook page.

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