Listen to this articleSolutions focused multimedia journalist, Titilope Fadare said it felt like a ‘miracle’ after she got accepted to the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) 2021 Female Reporters Leadership Programme (FRLP).
According to Titilope, she had made it her 2021 goal to get into the programme. This was after she had applied and got a rejection email, three times from the media nonprofit.
‘In fact when the 2021 applications began, over ten people sent it to be because they knew I had been applying to it over and again and thank God I finally got it’ Titilope told SolutionsPaper.
‘It felt like more than a dream come through for me because I have seen persons who have undergone this fellowship and seen their life afterwards and its like there is something they were instilling in them during the fellowship.’
It is understood that the overall objective of the FRLP fellowship is to equip female reporters with leadership skills and position them to take opportunities to lead, provide capacity development for advanced nuanced reporting and create a vibrant cohort of female practitioners who can mainstream girls and women in news reporting.
Titilope who works at Premium Times said this energised her to remain persistent and consistent with her application since 2017.
Titilope also noted the role solutions journalism played in helping her land the fellowship. Her solutions focused report on how some residents of Sokoto and Lagos states are responding to cases of gender-based violence in their communities emerged the first runner up under the story project category.
Her winning SoJo story earned her a plaque, cash prize of N50,000 and a brand new personal computer (PC) at the closing ceremony of the fellowship which took place on 09 June 2022 in Lagos state.
‘Whenever cases of GBV are mentioned in Nigeria, it is always about injustice but what we do not see on a normal is an intervention that is working and in this [report] communities are taking responsibility of their sexual and gender based violence issues.’
‘People are now collectively serving as respondents, people now see that perpetrators cannot go free anymore and if every other community in Nigeria replicate this in their space, we will see the eradication of GBV in Nigeria.’
Titilope also advised all practicing and emerging female journalists to tap into the FRLP opportunity to grow their career.
Be it in journalism or any other career field, Titilope’s success story encourages us to remain resilience as we strive to seize career enhancing opportunities in our profession.
The SolutionsPaper is a a multimedia outlet leveraging solutions and constructive journalism to spur civic action and participation in development issues across Africa.