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Nazima Raghubir is the First Woman Elected to Guyana Press Association

SHE was recently elected the first woman president of the Guyana Press Association (GPA), shattering the glass ceiling that existed for seven decades.

Although excited for her new role, Nazima Raghubir is ready to hit the ground running with plans to have the GPA offer more training for its journalists.

Guyana's first woman press association president thinks big“There is a high turnover of media workers, journalists in Guyana. A lot of us aren’t trained and we don’t have a journalism programme at our university. A lot come in after being trained in public relations and, to give an example, we have the oil and gas industry that is proving to be a major sector and a lot are not trained to understand the very basics. We recently had an issue with the Government and ExonMobil and the media came under criticism for not dissecting the contract the way we ought to have done. Part of that has to do with being under-resourced and the fact that media houses across the region have the same constraints, in that you’re here today at a feminism conference but when you go back you may have to cover a fire, the business chamber, a presentation on investment. A lot of us are not trained in specialised areas and so training has to be sustained,” Raghubir said.

Her other plans include transforming the GPA into a project-based body, supplying particular services as a media association and generating it’s own income. She also intends to focus on broadening the GPA’s base as a press association and has proposed to have some amount of constitutional reform to ensure more people in the profession are represented.

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