In-country trainers herald new era

A NEW ERA

The Women in News and Sport (WINS) program under Team Up has taken a significant step in its five-year history, facilitating its first series of workshops in the Pacific delivered exclusively by in-country trainers.

The program, which began in 2016 and was developed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s International Development unit (ABCID), is funded by the Australian Government.

While early training and mentoring activities were delivered face-to-face by ABC journalists, WINS has been moving towards identifying and training journalists in each country to deliver workshops.

With the COVID-19 pandemic pausing international travel this process has accelerated and, this year, a cohort of Pacific women in Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu were mentored by ABC staff remotely to become WINS trainers, and subsequently delivered workshops in their respective countries.

The first of these was a series of mobile storytelling workshops that began in March 2021, teaching mobile phone multimedia skills to women working for sport and media organisations. During the two-day program, attendees learnt photo, video and practical reporting skills using their phones.

Marie Sakumai, former executive sports producer at TVWAN in Papua New Guinea, attended the very first WINS workshop in 2016 as a participant and recently delivered PNG’s latest workshop herself as a co-trainer alongside Waliagai Olewale of NBC, who also attended the inaugural 2016 activity.

“The workshop was great, and the women that Waliagai and I trained were really keen,” Sakumai said. 

“In many cases, it was the first time I had got to know them, especially those who work in sport rather than the media. I’d seen their names in the papers, but I’d never met them before, so it was awesome to be able to help them with their media skills.”

Sakumai hopes to use her new skills as a workshop facilitator to run future training sessions for women in sports media in her home country.

Karen Shrosbery, WINS program manager at ABCID, said: “This model of remote mentoring and support has meant WINS can continue workshops face-to-face in the Pacific.

“WINS has always demonstrated an adaptative approach to training, responding to the needs of its alumni, but it is the close relationships and networks formed over the years within the program that led us to identifying these in-country trainers. The feedback from everyone involved was very positive and more workshops will be rolled out later this year.”

Discover what happened at each of the five Pacific workshops in this video: