To mark International Women’s Day on March 8, IPI is proud to celebrate some of the remarkable women media leaders and women-led newsrooms across our global network. Throughout the month of March, IPI will spotlight the inspiring and groundbreaking work of 20 individuals and organizations around the world.
Among the resilient leaders we recognize are those committed to ensuring the safety of journalists amid war and conflict. IPI member Rawan Damen is at the helm of one of the top pan-Arab media organizations, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, a cross-border network of investigative journalists covering corruption, climate change, human rights, and other public-interest stories across the Middle East and North Africa. Under Damen’s tireless leadership, ARIJ has spearheaded the #TheCoverageMustContinue campaign to help bring Palestinian journalists inside war-torn Gaza vital supplies and equipment, including cameras, laptops, phones, and power banks to continue their critical reporting.
In Ukraine, IPI member Lera Lauda is defending local journalism amid Russia’s full-scale invasion. As the founder of ABO Local Media Development Agency, which received the IPI-IMS Free Media Pioneer award in 2022, she has been at the forefront of transforming local legacy newsrooms, navigating the challenges posed by the war on both the media ecosystem and journalism professionals.
We also honor those who are working to support and amplify women journalists in their regions. Women in Media Ukraine, a grantee of IPI’s Ukraine rapid-response support fund, was founded in 2019 as a way to foster solidarity among women journalists in the country. What started as a Facebook group has blossomed into a thriving professional hub and network that offers training and employment opportunities as well as psychological, financial, and organizational support to the 1,500 women journalists in its network. In Kenya, Catherine Gicheru currently leads the African Women Journalism Project (AWJP), which supports investigative journalism about women and other marginalized groups – and wants to make the business case for gender reporting. Gicheru is one of the many media leaders – women and men – speaking at IPI’s upcoming 2024 World Congress in Sarajevo.
Simultaneously, women-led newsrooms across the IPI global network are proving vital outlets for the communities they serve. Alharaca Media, which will also join the IPI World Congress in May, is a digital newsroom in El Salvador founded in 2018 to cover news from a feminist perspective. Alharaca takes its name from a term often used in a pejorative way to dismiss women as being over-emotional. The team is reclaiming this term, taking an experimental approach to delivering news using different formats and storytelling and creating a space for the voices of marginalized people. Meanwhile, IPI member EVN Report, which launched in Armenia in the aftermath of the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh war, is the first English-language publication covering Armenian news for readers around the world, offering in-depth analyses of political, social, and economic issues, as well as on human rights and conflicts.
These are just a sampling of the 20 impactful individuals and organizations from across the IPI global network that we are honoring this International Women’s Day. Their stories underscore the varied and meaningful contributions made by women in the media around the world. As we celebrate these exemplary women, we invite the public to join us in recognizing their invaluable contributions to media, press freedom, and democracy. Stay connected with the campaign on our website and across our social media platforms throughout March.
