The Women’s Football World Cup is to be held in Germany in 2011. As a build-up to this major sporting event, the German Foreign Office and the General Organization for Youth & Sports in the Kingdom of Bahrain are hosting the “Women’s Football Cup ARABIA 2010 – On the road to Germany” from 18 to 28 October 2010 in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
The winning team will benefit from exclusive training in Germany in the run-up to the 2011 Women’s World Cup, which will be organized by the German Football Association and the German Olympic Sports Confederation.
For the Match Schedule (pdf):
“Women’s Football Cup ARABIA 2010”: reporting by Arab women journalists!
The Arab media are taking their time discovering women’s football. Coverage of the women’s sport, especially on the mass medium television, is rare and the approach tends to be conventional – goals, results and statistics. Only the competitive side of the sport is covered – and the opportunity missed to attract viewers (including women) whose main interests lie elsewhere. Yet journalists could tell countless stories about people from this world of football and their lives, stories that interest the public at large because the focus is not just the game itself, but the people on the pitch as well as on the sidelines, their struggles, failures and triumphs.
With women’s football, the spectrum of possibilities is wider still, since here important social issues are at stake. In the broadest sense what is at stake is women’s freedom and right to play football, a sport generally perceived as a male domain. Especially in the Arab world women football players stand for a young, self-confident generation keen to take up this challenge.
During the Women’s Football Cup ARABIA 2010 Deutsche Welle is organizing a DW-AKADEMIE workshop for Arab women journalists designed to help them produce professional coverage of women’s football. The main target group are women journalists on the sports coverage staff of Arab television stations with experience in producing sports programmes. But also women journalists with an interest in football from these stations’ current affairs programming or who are members of reporter pools will be participating in the workshop.
At the invitation of DW-AKADEMIE, ten women journalists from Arab partner broadcasters –including two from Bahrain – will participate. They are all from countries that will be competing in the Women’s Football Cup ARABIA 2010.
Since the aim of the exercise is production training, the focus will be on practical work. With their innovative coverage of the Women’s Football Cup ARABIA 2010, it is hoped the participants will help give women’s football in their home countries a higher profile in future.
DW-AKADEMIE is Deutsche Welle’s international centre for media development and consultancy as well as training for journalists. It offers its partner broadcasters and customers around the world a broad range of training and consultancy services.
