This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail, and our contributor community. This week’s newsletter was written by Rachel Pulfer, the executive director of Journalists for Human Rights.
Rachel Ombaka is a Kenyan journalist – she was a broadcaster, until her boss and his sexual demands got in the way. “I complained to HR. I said the men sit too close to us, they brush up against us,” she explained to Journalists for Human Rights’ chief correspondent Lisa LaFlamme last month. “And if you had to ask for funding to go out and do a story, the boss would say, oh, you need funding? For that … you’re going to have to meet me at the hotel.” Ombaka has since left the broadcaster to write for an online news site.
Journalists for Human Rights, the organization I run, worked with media partners across Kenya, supported by Global Affairs Canada, to develop a sexual harassment and abuse policy safeguarding women employed in newsrooms. The policy has since been implemented at the leading national broadcaster, KBC, allowing more women to work as reporters, free from harassment, thus ensuring the voices and perspectives of half the population are meaningfully included. (More on this to come in a special documentary from Lisa LaFlamme to air later in March.)