ILO to train 5,000 women in Pakistan

The International Labour Organization (ILO) in collaboration with the Canadian International Development Agency will train 5,000 women in Pakistan with a view to strengthen national mechanism to promote equal employment opportunities for women and to enhance skills of poor women in rural and urban areas of the selected districts, said ILO National Project Coordinator Farida Khan, while addressing a media forum on Tuesday. The media men from different newspapers, TV channels and radio stations signed a roundtable declaration in which they vowed to play a key role in empowering women by improving their public profile through a fair and representative coverage of working women.
Dr Farida said gender discrimination was at the highest ebb in Pakistan in the name of false religious values. The ILO has initiated a project titled “Promoting Gender Equality for Decent Employment (GE4DE)”. According to the project, gender equality at workplace was a fundamental human right and was instrumental in achieving poverty alleviation, she added. The project would focus on media to increase awareness and gender sensitive reporting of issues of gender equality, she said. Dr Farida said, “We started with small pilot projects and already we have reports of a group of women in Gwadar who have set up their own catering business in traditional sea food and, during Ramzan, reported an income of Rs 1,000 per person per day. In Karachi, we took some women who were working in worst of conditions, sorting fish and cleaning shrimps and prawns, and trained them to work for a fish processing firm. A group of those women has been picked for further training as factory supervisors.”
Muneeza Hashmi said that women could foster better treatment of women in the media by promoting sound media education programmes, by teaching others, by revisiting the programmes and news items which insult the dignity of women. Punjab University Mass Communication Department Director Dr Ahsan Akhtar Naz said media should highlight the problems of women instead of using them only for glamour and advertisements.