Women and Girl's Voices on Air.

How to articulate what we mean and how to express ourselves through speaking is one of the many challenges we face as we strive for women's welfare and empowerment. This is my personal observation in the past decades of my advocacy on advancement of women participation in various platforms and spaces. And I think this is the reason why I just couldn't let go of my radio broadcasting job, after all it in this job where I discovered many women issues and this became so helpful in trying to resolve them. This is where and how I actually started my passion for women's welfare advocacy and helped reach milestones and wins.

Together with the local government of my city, we conceptualize a radio program that is dedicated and focus to women and girls development and (SDG 5) gender equality popularization. To start, we have trained selected women leaders on basic broadcasting and reporting. We saw the hesitation of our women leaders despite the fact they were already trained to do public program hosting during our Magna Carta of Women Roll-out, but with motivation we finally went on air a year ago. 

Currently, we have 3 women and 3 girls reporters and segment hosts who regularly do the broadcasting of the events, issues and concerns of women, news about gender equality and does interviews of concerned leaders and other personalities. 

Today as I look back to how we started, I can't help but smile and say to myself that we actually did it. The radio program has a lot of challenges. First, our women and girl community's confidence in speaking out. Because women are used to just listen to men's discussion without them sharing their ideas. We still need to increase the capacities of women in terms of speaking and voicing out their issues and concerns. This behavior we still struggle up to now. But the radio program help and motivate them to speak out casually the daily struggles or challenges of women and girls in their communities. By this, we hope to encourage other women to not keep their silence but speak up so that the world would know of our sentiments and the answers to the issues that we encounter everyday that affects our lives and our future. Second, the cost of the radio program is a bit high, like the airtime pay and the transportation cost as we go to the field to do gather reports and information.. But with the support of the local government, we were able to source out fund from the gender and development budget. We have a supportive Mayor, city officials and the gender and development council who have allocated funds for the radio program and we are very grateful for this.

Getting feedback from our radio program audience and our live-streaming audience inspires us everyday. Comments from fellow women and girls with so much appreciation of the topics we discuss boost our morale to work more and make the radio program topics and guests more inspiring to our listeners and followers. So glad that we are hitting numerous objectives in this undertaking, like popularization of women laws especially the Magna Carta of Women in the Philippines, the CEDAW, SDG 5, Human Rights issues, Women and girls active participation in the development processes, women economic empowerment, violence against women and children, role of women in environment issues, increasing capacities of women, creating greater awareness of gender equality and tons of other issues :-) we really have a handful of topics! And soon I wish to interview our sisters in World Pulse. The radio program also pressures the local officials and other government agencies or even private sector to act and take actions on our concerns. We can only imagine how far will this go but I hope we will get support from our World Pulse sisters to better this program and help us sustain this, because women and girls voices matter and the information should be accessible to us and the calm voices of women can do so much!