The International Labour Organisation (ILO) in collaboration with Canadian International Development Agency will train 5000 women in Pakistan with a view to strengthen national mechanism to promote equal employment opportunities for women and to enhance skills of the poor women in rural and urban areas of selected districts.
The media persons belonging to different newspapers, TV channels and radio stations also signed a roundtable declaration in which they vow to play a key role in empowering women by improving their public profile through a fair and representative coverage of working women. ILO National Project Co-ordinator Frida Khan said this while addressing a media discussion forum here on Tuesday. She said the gender discrimination was at the highest ebb in Pakistan in the name of false religious values.
The ILO has initiated a project titled 'Promoting Gender Equality for Decent Employment (GE4DE)'. According to the project, gender equality in the world of work is a fundamental human right, critical to social justice and is instrumental in achieving poverty alleviation, she added.
The project will specifically focus on media to increase awareness and gender sensitive reporting of issues of gender equality in the world of work. She said that after devolution, provinces would be making their own labour policies. "We are also working on skills development through which we will train 5000 women for employment not only in conventional skills typically considered areas of women's expertise, but also more unconventional areas", she elaborated.
Dr Frida said, "We started with some small pilot projects and already we have reports of a group of women in Gwadar who have set up their own catering business in traditional sea food and during Ramazan reported an income of Rs 1000 per person per day. In Karachi we took some women who were working in the worst of conditions sorting fish and cleaning shrimps and prawns and trained them to work in for a fish processing firm and a group of those women has been picked for further training as factory supervisors".
Moneeza Hashmi said that women themselves could do much to foster better treatment of women in the media by promoting sound media education programmes, by teaching others, by revisiting the programmes and news items which insult the dignity of women or debase their role in society. She said that women must be enabled to play their part in the solution of the serious problems of the society and of society's future.
Punjab University Mass Communication Department Director Dr Ahsan Akhtar Naz said that the situation regarding women rights and equality was gradually getting better in Pakistan. He said the media should highlight the problems of women instead of using them only for glamour and advertisements. Lahore College for Women University Department of Mass Communication Chairperson Dr Anjum Zia said that she appreciated the efforts of ILO and CIDA for arranging media discussion on such an important issue.