By: Leila B. Gbati
Monrovia, Liberia: ActionAid Liberia will today conclude a two-day training session on gender responsive public services (GRPS) reporting for journalists in Monrovia.
The GRPS training brought together 15 journalists from various media institutions for the training held at the Corona Hotel in Sinkor.
It is intended to build and strengthen partnerships with media outlets, including social media profiling of anti-austerity work, share ActionAid Liberia’s consolidated education approach that focuses on gender responsive public education and its link to GRPS, and increase the capacity of the media professionals on the GRPS framework and how to use the tool for anti-austerity work.
Delivering the overview and special statement at the opening of the training session, ActionAid Liberia Learning Program Officer Prince D. Gaye said that ActionAid is trying to strengthen the capacity of journalists to be able to advocate and report against stereotypes in Liberia when it comes to economic justice.
Gaye said that the training is to broaden the minds of journalists on what is actually considered to be GRPS in Liberia and their (ActionAid’s) framework that can be used to address these issues and provide services that meet the needs of men and women.
According to him, they hope to achieve three things from the training which are; to build partnership with media institutions so that they can share and collaborate in order to produce and engage stakeholders around providing public services delivery in Liberia.
He also stated that in order to meet up with their objectives they will have to strengthen their capacity collectively with journalists who are reporting issues on daily basis in the country emphasizing that it will help them reached a broader audience of the people they served.
“And because journalists are key stakeholders in the process, we taught to strengthen their capacity in reporting quality and evidence based issues around GRPS and what it intends from the perspective of ActionAid”, he noted.
Commenting further, the ActionAid Learning Program Officer mentioned that after building partnerships, it is their hope that journalists will learn from their framework in order to inform their work on how they write, report, and investigate issues around GRPS in the education and health sectors.
He encouraged journalists to take the training seriously so that they could take home key points that would strengthen their reporting on some of the issues in Liberia, adding that this was especially true “when it comes to measures that the government is putting in place that affect women to some extent, including people with disabilities and marginalized groups in terms of public services.”
For her part, Jestina Kanneh Jawarah, a staff member of ActionAid, presented on the topic of “key concepts of gender and sex” as they relate to equality, equity, and inclusion, and understanding GRPS on how services can be gender-responsive.
She said that there are five key things to look at when it comes to GRPS, which are accessibility, affordability, adaptability, acceptability, and availability.
Jestina informed journalists that once basic public services are provided to citizens, it helps to prevent and reduce inequality between men, women, and marginalized groups.
Moreover, she emphasized that GRPS are public services that support efforts to eliminate irregularities that come from gender-based discrimination.
She named health, education, safe drinking water and sanitation, security, transportation, food security, etc. as basic public services that can be affordable and accessible for citizens.
“GRPS should be accessible to everyone, like for example in Nimba a pregnant who will have to walk for 3 hours before she come to one health center, that is not accessibility because by the time the pregnant woman in labor is being put in wheelbarrow from one village before reaching to the other village health center and if she has health complications she may die on arrival or delivery on the way. “So when you are providing services to be gender responsive, those are the things you need to look at,” she said.
Jestina emphasized that in term of effective GRPS you have the people who are affected with the issues adding that “and they have to be part of the preparation and decision making so that they can be able to say exactly what they want and whatever services you are providing will meet their needs but if you do it alone you will end regretting because it will not be useful to the people”.
