For immediate release
July 14, 2009
For more information:
Lindsey Wray
(202) 496-1992
LWray@iwmf.org
BBC Journalist Firle Davies Named 2009-10 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow
Washington, D.C. – The International Women’s Media Foundation announced today that Firle Davies, a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, has received the 2009-10 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship. Davies is the fifth recipient of the annual fellowship, which gives a woman journalist working in print, broadcast or online media the opportunity to focus exclusively on human rights journalism and social justice issues.
Davies will spend the nine-month fellowship as a research associate in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. She will also have access to The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
The fellowship is named for Elizabeth Neuffer, a Boston Globe reporter and the winner of a 1998 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award who was killed while on assignment in Iraq in 2003. Neuffer’s life mission was to promote international understanding of human rights and social justice.
A journalist for more than two decades, Davies has worked for the BBC since 2000. She has reported for domestic and world service radio, domestic and world television, and has produced online and current affairs documentaries.
Davies, 39, has worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Zaire, among other countries.
Some of the topics she has covered include:
- In the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zaire: the start of the Great Lakes conflict in 1996, the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees to Rwanda, mass rape used as a tactic of war, child soldiers, and the Congolese Army and Tutsi rebels.
- In Rwanda: the 1994 genocide, the mass exodus of refugees and the ensuing cholera outbreak, the rebel insurgency from Zaire, continuing ethnic violence, overcrowded prisons, public executions, and the Rwandan people’s continuing search for accountability and justice.
- In Sierra Leone: the mercenary outfit employed by the government to fight the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel army, the use of children by the RUF during the war, and diamonds and their destructive role in the conflict.
- In Somalia: the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s and the ongoing conflict between the Islamic Courts and the transitional government.
- In Sudan: the civil war in the south, slavery and the work of the United Nations Operation Lifeline Sudan, a consortium agencies providing humanitarian assistance.
Davies began her career in journalism in 1988 directly after graduating from high school in Africa. She began covering civil wars and humanitarian emergencies in Africa for Visnews, which was bought by Reuters in 1992.
“In nearly 20 years of covering conflict in Africa,” Davies wrote in her application for the IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship, “the one issue that now consumes me is the search for justice and accountability. Without justice, and without accountability in its most basic sense, acts of violence and hatred will continue to be committed.”
During her fellowship, Davies hopes to put into context her years of covering conflict and human rights and social justice issues. She plans to use her time in an academic environment to better understand patterns and precedents to help prevent future conflict and human rights abuses. Davies would also like to use what she learns in her courses to design ways to use journalism in support of a process for reconciliation in African countries.
“I have had amazing, extraordinary opportunities and experiences,” she wrote in her fellowship application, “but I feel more and more these days that I cannot continue to just take people’s stories. I have an obligation, a responsibility to do something more than that.”
The Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship is a project of the Elizabeth Neuffer IWMF Fund, which is generously supported by Peter Canellos, Mark Neuffer, Carolyn Lee, the Boston Globe and the Boston Globe Foundation, The New York Times, Boston Scientific, MIT Center for International Studies and friends and family of Elizabeth Neuffer. For further information about the fellowship, visit www.iwmf.org/categorydetail.aspx?c=neuffer or e-mail neuffer@iwmf.org.
Founded in 1990, the International Women’s Media Foundation is a vibrant global network dedicated to strengthening the role of women in the news media worldwide as a means to further freedom of the press. The IWMF network includes women and men in the media in more than 130 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.iwmf.org.
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