Gladness is a journalist and gender activist describes herself as a servant to her community. She is the Coordinator of Crisis Resolving Centre (CRC).
She is also a winner of the 2019 Drivers of change coordinated by the Gender Links (GL) an organized based in South Africa.
Gladness has taken on the responsibility of training fellow journalists in the area of Sexual and Reproductive Health. She targets mainstream and community based journalists in order to increase awareness on maternal and child health issues. As a result of the trainings, some radio stations initiated maternal and child health related talk shows in Arusha, Tanzania.
Gladness says: “In 2019 I trained 29 journalists. These included 10 males and 19 females from electronic, print and digital media. My intention is to ensure that my fellow journalists have information on maternal and child health and how to cover these issues in a manner that would draw the attention of decision makers, the community and fellow women. This initiative is aligned to my thesis that focused on media coverage of maternal and child health issues.” Gladness trained journalist who are mainly from community radios thus targeting the marginalized people in rural communities. She says these trainings were a great opportunity for her to put in use lessons learnt from the MPHL program.”
After the trainings Gladness put in place spaces on social media to allow dialogue on maternal and child health to continue with the trained journalists.
Gladness says: “I believe that the media is doing a good job regarding the coverage of maternal and child health issues because our government has embarked on building more health centres and renovated regional and district hospitals with maternity wings being improved. At the same time awareness and education to our communities and women have been done through media including SMS messages through the mobile phone.”
Trained journalists speak out
Najjat Omar who works with CG FM radio, a community radio in Tabora region says. “Through that training Najjat says she is now good at reporting Gender Based Violence stories and know about SDG and GBV policies.”
“After my training with Gladness, we introduced a special program for maternal health:” Joel Headman, a radio presenter at Triple A FM radio station in Arusha.
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