TVE's UK Launch of 'Why Women Count'. A Highlights Report

“TVE are committed & passionate filmmakers who have gone to the ends of the earth for us” (Al Jazeera English’s commissioning editor Flora Gregory),“TVE’s message needs to be widely known if we are to have any chance of producing the better world tomorrow that we all desire” (Bruce Lloyd Professor of Strategic Management London South Bank University). These are just two of the ringing endorsements of the work of Television Trust for the Environment (TVE). The Broadcasting for Change Network founded by TVE in 1995 is committed to producing and airing programmes on women’s rights and equality worldwide.

The five-minute, short films in the ‘Why Women Count’ series explore women’s empowerment – what it means in the lives of ordinary women and men, and the role it plays in the political, economic and social development of countries, communities and families worldwide. Stories include widows fighting to overturn stigmatization in Nepal, the struggle by MP Njoki Ndung’u to get her bill outlawing sexual offences through Kenya’s parliament; textile worker Biljana Smileva’s fight against sweat shop exploitation in Macedonia; and journalist Fadia Bazzeh’s report on the bombing of Lebanon in July, 2006.

The TVE series “Why Women Count” is a succession of vivid and compelling glimpses into women’s contributions that otherwise remain unacknowledged or unappreciated in everyday life. According to the Arab Human Development Report (2005), there lacks a recognition of the “true extent of women’s participation in social and economic activities and in the production of the components of human well being” in the North Africa and Middle East region. The same is true of other regions across the world. The silence about women’s participation contributes to practices of marginalisation and discrimination such that the benefits of participation do not accrue to women in general. The series will go a long way in breaking the silence and is essential viewing for anyone concerned with not only women’s lives but with sustainable human development as a whole.

Further information is available from the website at www.tve.org/whywomencount.