WOMEN IN THE MEDIA: THE TANZANIAN SITUATION

Presentation by Elias Mhegera at the GEMSA occasion July 2011

General Observation

i.                    The situation is improving gradually for instance in our news room we have gone back to the ratio of at 60 males to 40 female journalists. This is after female journalists who were employed had to be laid off on grounds of incompetence and poor delivery

ii.                  However our media house has retained very few journalists to the extent that even the number of males is also very few with four journalists as full time employees and three as correspondents. So we do have seven journalists in total while we do have four female journalists one in the news room and three correspondents. The other female journalists that we used to have in our news room have gone for further studies.

iii.                There is a general feeling that female journalists or those with a formal training in communication prefers to go for public relations or as communication officers in some private companies like telecommunication companies and a few in Government parastatals like banks and in some ministries.

iv.               Currently there is an attempt by public relations executives to hire the services of public relations who can write properly which means this will have to force those who were escaping print media to go there in order to get some experiences before they go to the careers of public relations and communications.

v.                 There is a general feeling that journalism as a field is for the tough guys who are prepared to face the tough challenges in the field.

Reasons for this trend

i.                    unfriendly working environment: for instance poor remunerations, lack of transpirations and insurance schemes which discourages female journalists

ii.                 Print media has a lot of challenges including scarcity of computers and some of media houses pays very lowly for the stories that are submitted by journalists generally including their male journalists

Suggested solutions

i.                   To enhance services to journalists in general in order to encourage retention of media personnel in general

ii.                 To provide motivations to the media staff through long term courses at mid career and tertiary institutions.

iii.              Provision of attachment schemes to journalists in general

iv.               Media houses owners and their CEOs to be involved in finding a long lasting solution to these problems.