THANK YOU to everyone who has helped us Celebrate the Disruptors this holiday season!
We are so grateful to each of you for the incredible amount of generosity you have shown since we launched our campaign on #GivingTuesday and we are SO close to our goal of $70,000!
Throughout the holiday season, JHR shared stories from across the globe Celebrating the Disruptors; those who, in 2020, have had the courage to highlight the social divides the pandemic has exposed and push for better.
First, we celebrated disruptor Sandra Safi Bashengezi, a Congolese journalist, trainer and filmmaker who has focused her work on the advancement of female journalists in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the DRC, only 34% of journalists are women and those who do succeed rarely manage to occupy positions of power. Worse yet, female journalists in DRC are at high risk of being sexually harassed by their informants or colleagues.
Yet Sandra persisted. She co-founded a school for journalism and mentored women and student journalists. One of the stories she mentored helped put Frederick Bitumike, a parliamentarian responsible for mass rape in Eastern DRC, behind bars.
In this paper, she lays out a concrete action plan with tangible strategies to mitigate the threats female Indigenous journalists face every day.
Then, we celebrated Siyabulela Mandela for his leadership in East and Southern Africa on the Mobilizing Media to Fight COVID-19 project. While global attempts to fight the coronavirus were hampered by conspiracy theories, we saw how leadership and access to the right information could help beat the coronavirus.
Siyabulela stepped up to the challenge in South Sudan, working to ensure journalists in the world’s newest country had both the information and equipment they needed to help protect a population of 8 million in a country with 8 ventilators.
Finally, we celebrated Judie Kaberia, a multi-award winning journalist and JHR’s Gender Media Trainer for the Voice for Women and Girls’ Rights project in Kenya. Since the onset of COVID-19, Judie has been creating awareness through research and reporting on how the pandemic has heightened the existing risk of women and girls becoming victims of human trafficking for sex exploitation, child labour and domestic serviture.
Judie’s work has gone far beyond reporting – she has worked with Civil Society Organizations and government agencies to rescue and counsel the huge number of young girls looking for safe houses and shelters amidst the pandemic.
Each of these stories makes clear why the work JHR is doing is SO important.
But we can’t do it without YOUR support.
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JHR needs your support to make this year more than ever to continue their important work.
Thank YOU for supporting Journalists for Human Rights!