Media coverage of health issues in sub-Saharan Africa has been inadequate in terms of both content and quantity, but more creative approaches are now being used to address these shortcomings.

"Some major social issues of our times are simply not covered, like gender and AIDS," Colleen Lowe Morna, director of GenderLinks, a Southern African think-tank, told African editors and journalists at a conference organised by the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF) in Johannesburg last week to discuss ways of improving health coverage.

A survey by GenderLinks earlier this year found that HIV/AIDS accounted for only three percent of all news items carried by southern African media, despite the region being the worst hit by the pandemic. By comparison, South African papers allocated sport 20 percent to 25 percent of reporting space.

"Media organisations and their editors are conservative and hard to change," commented Tom Mshindi, former editor of The Standard newspaper in Kenya.

Mshindi opened the doors of The Standard, one of the oldest newspapers in Africa, to a two-year project called Maisha Yetu ('Our Lives' in Swahili), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation via the IWMF. Its strategy is to improve the coverage of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by working intensively from the publisher to the reporters in a newspaper or magazine.

Six media houses in Botswana, Senegal and Kenya became Maisha Yetu Centres of Excellence, with a local trainer assigned to each. To ensure managerial buy-in, the head of each organisation was also targeted, to create champions of health reporting in mid- and upper-level management.

After carrying out a needs assessment, the trainer designed a plan, including workshops to improve technical and information skills, personal mentoring, widening access to sources, and persuading mid-level editors to assign more space to health.

Two years later the quantity and the quality of health stories has grown significantly, with several participating journalists receiving awards for their work.

Meanwhile, Internews, an NGO dealing with the media, has been improving the capacity of radio journalists in Kenya to report on HIV/AIDS. In 2004 it set up a digital radio studio and media resource centre in downtown Nairobi as part of its Local Voices project, where radio producers have free access to all facilities, telephone and internet. They are coached in scriptwriting and research by a full-time trainer and producer, and can put together programmes for broadcast by their own radio stations.

Practical training workshops with a curriculum of 70 percent technical skills and 30 percent information on HIV/AIDS are open to all radio producers. "If journalists lack the technical skills they won't be able to produce good stories, no matter how much they know about AIDS," said Internews senior resident adviser Mia Malan.

In the first year of Local Voices, non-sponsored news stories on HIV increased by 225 percent, and more were aired in prime time, while the topics broadened to include religion, sexual abuse, nutrition and people living with HIV.

"I saw editors go from the point of resistance to the point of active interest in health issues," remarked Emily Nwankwo, a media consultant in Nairobi.

But the gatekeepers - editors who control space and resources - remain a problem, as they prefer to focus on political and economical reporting, rather than health coverage. The Southern African Editors Forum (SAEF) has adopted an HIV/AIDS policy and media action plan to encourage editors to provide space, resources, training and motivation for reporting on the pandemic.

The AIDS story, says SAEF, should be covered "with imagination, initiative and sensitivity to gender, and the larger social forces driving the epidemic."

SAEF recently developed guiding principles for ethical reporting on HIV/AIDS and gender, and has also agreed to introduce workplace policies on HIV/AIDS and gender. The Times of Zambia newspaper and the Kaya FM radio station in South Africa are pioneering this process.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]