Journalism training for women in Raqqa

Our latest training workshop for women has just finished in Syria. This time, the workshop was taking place in the city of Raqqa, former ISIS stronghold.

Implementing our project in this region represents a lot to us. Symbolically, this project is very meaningful, taking place in a region where women were completely silenced for many years. By training them in journalism, we are giving them the tools to express themselves, to make their voices heard again. In a city undergoing a reconstruction, we want to help make these women influential in society, fully participating to the future of their region and country.

The field workshops, lasting 70 hours spread over a month, constituted the first phase of the training. 9 women completed the training with skills for professional journalism (writing, audio, photo and video) and have just started the second phase of the programme. For the next 4 months, the participants will receive continuous online training. They will write articles, produce videos and podcasts under the guidance of our experienced trainers who will coach them daily, offering them advice and suggestions to improve their productions and abilities.

This immersive training under “real world” conditions allows participants to express themselves by publishing on the platform Ayny Aynak (womenofsyria.com), about subjects of their choice, while addressing Syrian women directly. We also launch regular thematic campaigns, such as the current campaign “Survivors or not” which compiles vibrant testimonies of former female detainees on difficulties they meet during the transition back into normal life. The participants are continually professionalizing with a goal to them work with local or international media.

The Raqqa training is the fourth training implemented as part of our Women Empowerment Through Media programme launched at the beginning of 2017. This programme trains Syrian women in journalism in order to give women a larger space in the public debate, as well as to promote female-orientated topics and issues in the Syrian media and in conversations about the future of the country.

Since the launch of the project, 70 women have been trained in journalism at a professional level and more than 150 pieces of content have been published on our platform Ayny Aynak. Following the training, these women benefit from our important media network in Syria to evolve in the journalistic field and to fundamentally change the Syrian media environment.