A woman can build a company, change a policy, advance a field of research or hold a community together for decades and still leave only a thin public record of what she has done. Her work may be known to the people closest to it, while the wider world has little to consult when it asks who led, who contributed and whose ideas mattered.
Maua Bio Magazine and Fence Africa 24 are partnering to help close that gap. The collaboration brings together Maua’s biographical storytelling about African women and women of African descent with Fence Africa 24’s pan-African news coverage. Its purpose is to give women’s work both the depth of a lasting record and a place in the wider conversations about Africa’s present and future.
Research shows why both matters. The Global Media Monitoring Project’s 2025 study found that women accounted for 26% of people seen, heard or spoken about in print, television and radio news worldwide. On news websites, the figure was 29%. Despite three decades of monitoring, women’s presence in traditional news had risen by only nine percentage points since 1995.
Africa’s progress has been slower still. According to the project, women’s share of people in African print and broadcast news rose by approximately one percentage point between 1995 and 2025. Its 2020 findings placed women at 22% of news subjects and sources in African mainstream news. Those figures describe particular news samples and media formats, rather than every form of media coverage, but they reveal a persistent imbalance in who enters the news record.
Being included in a story does not always mean being recognised for what one knows. In a 2026 study spanning print, online, television and radio outlets across Southern Africa, Gender Links found that women made up 29% of news sources. They accounted for 38% of sources speaking from personal experience, but only 30% of expert commentators and 24% of spokespersons. The gap is about authority as well as attention.
Maua Bio Magazine approaches that gap through biography. Its features document women as people with histories, ideas, decisions and bodies of work that cannot be reduced to a title or a brief quote. A well-researched story gives readers a fuller understanding of a woman’s contribution and creates a public account that can be found, shared and returned to over time.
Fence Africa 24 brings a different editorial strength. The digital newsroom covers business, politics, technology, finance, energy, culture and other fields across Africa and its diaspora. Those are the same fields in which women lead and contribute yet are too often missing from the people invited to explain what is happening. The partnership aims to bring more of their knowledge and work into that broader coverage.
Who appears in the news depends, in part, on whom journalists and editors choose to approach. The 2025 Global Media Monitoring Project found that women made up 29% of the people featured or heard in stories reported by women journalists, compared with 24% in stories reported by men. The difference does not tell us why each journalist made those choices, but it shows that the people invited into a story can change depending on who reports it. If a newsroom keeps returning to familiar sources, women doing significant work may never be asked to speak about it. Through this partnership, Maua Bio Magazine and Fence Africa 24 intend to look more deliberately for those women, document their contributions with care and bring their expertise into the wider story of Africa.
Maua and Fence Africa 24 cannot correct a continent-wide media imbalance on their own. They can make a clear commitment within their own publishing work. African women and women of African descent deserve coverage that takes their achievements seriously, records them accurately and allows their ideas to travel beyond the circles that already know their names.
Achievement does not automatically become history. Someone has to document it.
