Global sport for development partnerships

Women in News and Sport (WINS) initiative

The Women in News and Sport initiative (WINS) was announced by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon Julie Bishop MP, on 21 October 2016. WINS is an innovative gender equality partnership between the Australian Government and ABC International Development.

Supported through the Australian aid program, the goal of the $225,000 initiative is to increase opportunities for women in sports journalism in the Indo-Pacific region and through those opportunities increase stories about women in sport.

This initiative will leverage existing Pacific and Asia Sports Partnerships programs by using them as a mechanism to find and highlight sports stories, particularly involving champions of women’s participation in sport at the community level.

WINS will provide Indo-Pacific women journalists in PNG, Fiji, Indonesia and Vietnam with the tools to carve out a career in the male-dominated world of sports media.

The program works in three areas:

providing skills training and industry knowledge through an intensive workshop with Australian broadcasters and women sports journalists
improving multi-platform content creation; and
networking with other women sports journalists, media and sport organisations.

The WINS initiative will create economic opportunities for female journalists across the region, and use sport and sports coverage to challenge community perceptions around what women are able to achieve.