Empowering Iraqi Women Journalists: Interview with Christa Waegemann

As Iraq continues to embrace progress and development across all fields, the increasing role of women in the public sphere becomes an important step towards building a more equitable society.

Since 2020, the German organisation ‘Media in Cooperation and Transition’ (MICT) has managed projects dedicated to supporting Iraqi women journalists to break barriers in a previously male-dominated field, and delivering high-impact public interest journalism on critical topics.

MICT’s most recent, “Together We Report: Women’s Media Collective” project,  trained and supported Iraqi women journalists to deliver reports on topics including pollution, environment, and agriculture. The project was delivered in collaboration with the German government’s foreign aid organisation Gesellschaft für Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

MICT’s Middle East Director, who oversees the “Together We Report: Women’s Media Collective” project, Christa Waegemann, shares the story of  her time living and working in Iraq, training Iraqi women journalists.

Photo courtesy: Christa Waegemann

 Tell us about your experience living in Iraq and working with MICT?

“My personal experience with Iraq goes all the way back to 2009, when I first started working at the Iraqi embassy in Washington, D.C. so you could say that was my introduction to Iraq many, many years ago. And then I lived in Iraq in 2016 and 2017…I eventually ended up at MICT in 2020. And I had been hired originally for the first phase of this women’s journalistic project.”

Throughout her time in Iraq, Christa mentions the notable difference in stability from her first experience of Iraq, compared to her trip across the country  earlier this year.

“I was just in Baghdad two weeks ago. I go back almost every two or three months and it is a different city from when I lived there. You can really see that there is security. People can go out and enjoy their lives. The restaurant scene is booming.”

“I’ve also travelled to Tikrit, Samarra, Babylon, Najaf, Karbala…Nineveh, Duhok, Kurdistan. 

It’s about time that everyone can start to enjoy life with their families, but there’s still a lot to be done to make things even better.”

Photo courtesy: Christa Waegemann

We’ve been following the Together We Report project, especially the environmental coverage. Can you tell us more about it?

“It was an 18-month program where the women journalists came together. It was five different teams, for five different publications…For 18 months, they would conduct research, come up  with a hypothesis to  prove and write a story. We supported them with financial means.  Each team also had a mentor, who would help and guide them through this process over 18 months.”

“These teams of women we brought together were mid-level journalists from all over the country, who had at least a little bit of publication background and journalistic skills. They formed their own teams that had complementary skills, and the structure around this was collaborative journalism.”

Christa describes the process of collaborative journalism in the project as “how you can  really bring resources together to investigate and unearth tough topics…that was the basis for this project, how can we bring women together from all over the country, with different backgrounds, access to different resources, and then for them to come up with their own topics to investigate?”

What was your proudest moment during this project?

“It is at the end of each project where you feel so proud, you see all your work come together at the end of the year. Many of the women in this last phase really grew so much. A lot of them doubted at times that they wouldn’t get to where they are. And a lot of them weren’t sure if they could pull it off. And they did. To also be published in a big outlet, to have your name on that piece after so much work, to see it come together and to have learned so much, you can only hope that they’ll continue and do more in the future.

Photo courtesy: Christa Waegemann

What does the future look like for Iraqi women in journalism?

“I do think that more and more Iraqis are welcoming women into the profession,” says Christina,  “more media outlets, and hopefully editors, are becoming more open to women leading stories and taking on news stories and are not just dismissing them for women’s stories or women’s topics and allowing women to go out into the field more.
Women are slightly more visible within the Iraqi media scene compared to maybe 15 years ago, but it’s still quite challenging.”

Despite the challenges, Iraq evidently also shares this vision for progress and inclusion. Various projects coordinated by the EU and the UN across Iraq in recent years have created more diverse opportunities for women in media related fields. For example, in 2025, UNESCO organised workshops for 184 women content creators, journalists, and CSO leaders across Baghdad, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah, pointing to a substantial, active network of women in media.