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"Now, 18 months later, all of Juana's children are in school. She went from being somebody's servant to somebody who when she walks down the street of her community, people stop her and shake her hand and thank her for the stories that she is telling, or ask, 'When are you going to interview me? I have a story that you have to hear.'"
The Press Institute for Women in the Developing World is an international nonprofit organization and citizen journalism initiative. Last month I interviewed Cristi Hegranes, its Founder and President. In January, Cristi was named one of the 21 Leaders of the 21st Century for 2008 by Women's eNews. She was also awarded their annual Ida B. Wells prize for Bravery in Journalism. You can listen to the interview on the Big Vision Podcast, or read an edited transcript below.
Cristi Hegranes: My name is Cristi Hegranes and I am the President and Founder of The Press Institute for Women in the Developing World which is an international nonprofit organization that was founded in order to train women in developing countries to become investigative reporters to report their own news.
The goals of the organization are three-fold. We use journalism because it is a very empowering profession, enabling people to become the "question askers" in their societies. It is a really exciting and empowering position, especially for women in developing countries. Our primary goal is to provide that empowering employment.
The secondary goal is to provide better free, or fair information to people in these countries. So often, government control, or just lack of access to information and media, prevents people from really being able to be educated and informed about serious issues that are going on around them. We make a huge effort to disseminate our news locally via radio partnerships, and other satellite partnerships, so that the people in the communities we serve are benefiting from our news first.
The third goal would be, on an international level, to take this news, that is really created from the inside out, as opposed to the traditional model of foreign correspondence, which is an outsider coming in, out into the world. We sell our content to mainstream and other media organizations all over the world.
Britt Bravo: Why is it important to have women citizen journalists in developing countries at this time? What is it that motivated you to create this program now?
CH: You know it is funny; it actually didn't start out as a women-centered initiative, but the more research I did about creating global training sites and free media enterprises in these developing countries, training women just makes the most sense. When women have access to specific skills, training, and education, all of a sudden their survival and livelihood statistics shoot way up, not only their own, but entire communities.
For example, when women have this kind of specific skill-set training, they are more likely to have less children, to keep the children they do have in school, to be able to provide access to medical care, and things like that. Training women became an obvious imperative for us when we are talking about who are we going to train and why.
I think there is an extra added level of really pushing the envelope of gender equality. In some of the places where we work, women are very often not in professional roles whatsoever, much less the media. We are pushing an envelope there.
There is also a really practical level of source access. For some of the topics that we train our reporters to cover, like reproductive rights and political oppression, women have better access to the kind of sources that we want than men, outsiders, or other traditional foreign correspondents would.
BB: Can you talk a little bit about the program, how long it is, what the women learn, and what some of the challenges are for them to make the training happen within their every day life? Who are the women who are showing up? Are they women with families, are they young, are they old, and how are they fitting the training into what I am sure is a very busy, and already challenging life?
CH: Right, exactly. Well, they are all of the above. Our age ranges in all of our global training sites range from 19 to 56. We are training women at all levels in their life. Many of our trainees and
