Rural Women's Radio

As part of a three-part project with FAHAMU and local partners, CMFD is working with rural women in Southern, East and West Africa to produce radio/ podcast prgrammes about women's rights, especially related to rural women.

In collaboration with the Rural Women's Movement a, an 8-day training took place from 19 - 26 August 2007. Over the course of the workshop, women from rural communities in Kwa-Zulu Natal and a representative from the Centre for Public Participation planned, researched, conducted interviews, wrote scripts and created a series of features covering a range of issues such as evictions of widows from their marital homes, women’s inheritance rights and the impact of HIV/AIDS, sexual violence against girl children, forced/arranged marriages, young women and employment and grandmothers and orphans - all issues that receive little mainstream media attention. Each had never made a radio programme before. The programmes will be made available to local radio stations, as well as being distributed over the internet as ‘podcasts’. The workshop is part of the UmNyango Project, an innovative project to use ICTS to promote and protect the human rights of rural women in KwaZulu Natal.