Lahore: Experts have urged the mainstream media to give more space and dedicated airtime to the issues like population, reproductive health, youths inclusion, child marriages and gender-based violence.
Over two dozen journalists, bureau chiefs and digital editors from leading news organizations gathered here at the fourth meeting of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Media Coalition organized by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) with the support of the Netherlands government.
The session brought together senior journalists from across the province to build a sustained data bank for evidence-based reporting on population, health, development, etc. to encourage responsible, data-driven reporting. The session also discussed reporting ethics with a data-sharing exercise in which they were given labour force, PSLM and census datasets and asked to identify potential news stories.
Tania Durrani, Provincial Coordinator, UNFPA told the meeting about the sustained parliamentary engagement,
including a study visit that took the Punjab legislators to Sindh to review the province’s child marriage law that helped secure the passage of the Punjab Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Bill.
She said the UNFPA Media Coalition’s purpose is information exchange rather than instruction. She pledged that UNFPA and SDPI would continue to provide journalists with condensed data summaries, legal updates and access to technical and legal experts through the coalition’s forum.
Mariam Nawaz, Head of Communication and Advocacy, UNFPA urged reporters to move away from sensationalism in covering gender-based violence, a recurring pattern of journalists approaching survivours, including minors, for details of assaults. She proposed four tests for coverage, i.e. consent, safety, dignity and utility, saying newsrooms should stop identifying reproductive health coverage with population control messaging, which she said, reduces the population bomb framing to a burden narrative rather than treating population as a dev
elopment asset. Citing a UNESCO finding, Ms Nawaz said three out of four women face some form of online violence, and that journalists themselves are frequent targets of digital abuse, most of which goes unreported.
Dr Sajid Amin, Deputy Executive Director (Research), SDPI told participants that the coalition was not a tick-box exercise but an attempt to build a sustained public conversation on issues that are taboos in Pakistani society. He said journalists were champions of change with more reach than any government forum. He called upon the editors and bureau chiefs to give these subjects dedicated airtime and more space in their reports and columns.
Ms Hasna, UNFPA’s Reproductive Health Specialist for the Punjab, told the forum that while a pre-marital counselling bill exists for the Punjab, implementation remains inconsistent. She said UNFPA has trained clergy (religious scholars such as ulema) on the subject and introduced pre-marital counselling services at some health facilities but noted “a discrep
ancy within the system itself” between policy and practice.
As part of the session, organizers demonstrated an exercise in which an AI system was prompted to generate potential story headlines from the same Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa datasets, framed around themes including regional development budgets, family-planning returns on investment, youth unemployment, out-of-school children, child marriage and maternal mortality.
Ms Durrani closed the session by asking participants to treat the coalition as a continuing resource rather than a one-off event, offering UNFPA’s legal and technical experts to answer follow-up queries and committing to circulate condensed, bite-sized data summaries through the coalition’s outreach forum.