Malawi Institute of Journalism (MIJ) for 50-50 gender equality in the media practice

The Malawi Institute of Journalism (MIJ) was established in 1995 and was set to improve the quality of journalism in Malawi, by promoting media independence and professionalism. MIJ as a media training institution has a radio station to offer hands on experience to the students. MIJ offers Certificate and Diploma courses in Journalism. The curriculum encompasses 14 modules at Certificate and 12 at Diploma. The courses have been designed to deal with emerging social and economic issues in which gender is inclusive. Examples of the modules which are offered are Human Rights, HIV and AIDS and Public Health Reporting, Literature, Photojournalism, Environmental reporting, News Writing and reporting that have topics that specifically tackle gender. The other subjects like radio production, television production, desktop and publishing are skills oriented and not really gender friendly. In these subjects, at the institution we have made gender a very important element in the subjects. When the tutors teach these subjects, they usually encourage female students to participate more in the classroom activities and not leave male students to take over most of the responsibilities. As a tutor, together with my colleagues we have attended a number of gender workshops. The knowledge gained from these workshops has helped us a lot by enabling us to feature gender in the classroom work, extracurricular activities done in clubs and societies. Importantly, we make certain that there is equal participation of the students in workshops and trainings by selecting equal numbers of boys and girls to attend. Also students are encouraged to engage themselves in various school activities done outside the college campus e.g. awareness campaigns conducted by clubs and societies. For instance there is Debate Club, Drama club and MIJ for Cancer club. MIJ for Cancer is a club that was established to help people in the country with information and issues surrounding Cancer. The club works in conjunction with Cancer Association of Malawi. These groups had on their own been able to organize and conduct awareness campaigns in a number of communities in the country addressing issues like Gender, HIV and AIDS, Health, Education, Climate change and Human rights.