In Yemen, this woman CEO is fighting back against hate speech

For years, Western media have depicted Yemen as a country limping through civil war and mired in poverty. Barren urban landscapes, coups, famine – these crises and more dominate news from the country and region.

While the country does face many challenges, Areena Omar's upbringing and work experience grant her another view. As a young woman whose parents raised her to believe that her dreams – education, independence, meaningful work – were within reach, she spends her days bringing that same optimism to other Yemeni women.

"It's a misconception that all of Yemen is in difficult circumstances," Omar said. "Yes, it is true that we were once under al Qaeda's rule, and that there has been war and violence. But it's not all about war here, there is everyday life, culture, and in southern Yemen, women actually have more liberty than elsewhere in the country."

Women's work

Today, Omar is the CEO of Media Sac for Media and Development, a non-governmental non-profit youth organization in Hadramout and a DW Akademie partner. Together with DW Akademie, the two organizations help young people use media wisely to better understand their world, and to learn about and aim toward media leadership roles.

In partnership with DW Akademie, Media Sac works with journalists in Yemen to foster more and better reportage over women and their lives in Yemen. Many women in the country want to work to support themselves and their families, and the country's war has often made this necessary.

"Thanks to our collaboration with Media Sac, we've been able to bring media and information literacy to even the remotest regions of Yemen and to minority groups, like the Mehri – one of Yemen’s largest tribes," said Nadin Salama, DW Akademie project officer for media development in the Middle East and North Africa. "This effort fosters inclusion and builds resilience against misinformation, empowering communities that were previously out of reach."

Media Sac is also about to roll out Gender Newsroom, a media platform that will produce women-centered content in Yemen. It will accept podcast, visual and investigative proposals from women reporters who have lost their jobs due to downsizing in the media industry. 

Media Sac, which was Omar's idea and which she oversees with project manager Saba A. Al-Amoudi, also trains journalists in Yemen to report on women's issues, and specifically on hate speech targeted at women.

"We feel it is important to talk about these subjects," Omar said. "There is the basic problem of men expecting women to be submissive. Other issues are women's healthcare, and the ability for a woman to have her own passport."

Women, she noted, have eagerly looked for jobs since Yemen's civil war, which started in 2014 and has so far led to more than 330,000 deaths, with some 60 percent of those caused by hunger, lack of healthcare and unsafe water. Among these deaths are about 11,000 children.

Reliable and compelling journalism

"A lot of women go to work here because they must," Omar said. "They often prefer to work with other women, partly because they hope to network and to find other opportunities. At the same time, they face threats. They are harassed because of their clothing, their presence in public places, not wearing veils, even if it is hard to wear one while you are working."

Media Sac, a DW Akademie partner in Yemen, has trained journalists to report on women in the country, highlighting both their challenges and ways they have helped themselves and their families.

Reliable and compelling journalism can help, she said. In November 2021, Media Sac established a cooperation with the University of Arizona's student newspaper and its journalism school to develop better reporting on Yemen. The idea was to build cultural understanding and exchange journalism practices.

The project, called "The Bridge," paired the American university with four Yemeni universities, in Taiz, Aden, Sheba Province and in Hadramout. Altogether, the partnership included 70 male and female students, and their collaborative reporting covered women-led businesses in Yemen, photo galleries on Yemeni life, street food in Yemen, and the country’s water crisis.

"Our students and faculty at The University of Arizona learned so much from our partners in Yemen and those relationships have endured," said Professor Jeannine Relly, associate dean for faculty affairs and inclusion at the University of Arizona. Omar, she said, was instrumental is forging the academic partnership.

"We had dozens of students and faculty – close to 100 in total – working together in projects around disinformation and information verification, media ethics and representation, and media entrepreneurship," Relly said.

The stories, however, appear only on the University of Arizona’s website because of security concerns at the Yemeni universities.

This self-censorship, said Omar, illustrates the central aim of her work.

"Silence," she said, "hurts our rights."

The project activities in partnership with Media Sac were implemented by DW Akademie, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. As a federally owned enterprise, GIZ supports the German government in achieving its objectives in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development.