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💡 this team covers issues through a gender lens

Eliza Anyangwe, editor of CNN As Equals.

Eliza Anyangwe is on a mission. As the editor of CNN’s award-winning “As Equals” series, Anyangwe leads a global team dedicated to reporting on the inequalities and injustices facing women and girls around the world.

“I often say that our mission is to redefine what is considered an important story and to redefine who gets to tell those stories,” she says. “Not just tell the story of that woeful woman who has to walk 200 kilometers to fetch water at the well, for example, but to look upstream and identify where the injustice is. Maybe someone has cut off her water supply?”

Anyangwe points to one of the first pieces she commissioned as a prime example. It was a story on women in Chile, a country with strict anti-abortion laws, titled “Chile’s government distributed faulty birth control pills. Now more than 150 people are pregnant.”

“If you look at the majority of the stories that were published about this, most of the stories find one or two really strong characters and just tell the story of how these birth control pills that were faulty have made their lives worse, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to explore agency, and the source of the wrongdoing. So it took us longer. But what our story has that most others don’t is tracing back the source of these pills to a German pharmaceutical company whose subsidiary in Latin America, in Chile, is making these pills, and discovering that this is not the first time that their pills have been recalled,” Anyangwe says.

CNN launched As Equals in January 2018 with an emphasis on deep enterprise reporting and immersive visual storytelling, set apart from the daily news grind. With a grant from the Gates Foundation, Anyangwe has been able to build a dedicated global team and expand the important work. From documentaries to workshops to virtual events, the team serves as a mini-innovation incubator within the network, experimenting with different types of storytelling – such as narrated essays.

With no shortage of issues of injustice, how do they choose what stories to pursue?

“A lot of our journalism starts with listening. Whether it’s on large projects, like ‘White lies,’ which is our skin whitening investigative series, we spent a couple of months just inviting people affected by or involved in this issue across the world to tell before we started reporting.”

Anyangwe explains that they use these listening exercises to examine what topics have already been extensively covered and where the gaps are in the narrative, as well as other issues at play. They also give the team an opportunity to establish relationships with people who can use the reporting to change things.

Other impactful stories from the series that have prompted real-world change over the past four years include the commuted death sentence of teenage bride Noura Hussein, Rwandan opposition politician Diane Rwigara’s release from jail and a profile of activist Amira Adawe that prompted action from US policymakers and retailers around the issue of skin whitening products.

Is there one story she’s particularly proud of?

“Ahead of the Olympics, last year, we partnered with CNN Sports to tell the story of two intersex athletes and the testosterone rules that, despite the lack of consensus on the science, are having a significant negative professional and personal impact on some of the most marginalized women athletes. In ‘Running as equals’ we show that the International Olympics Committee and the World Athletics Federation have ended up playing a really fundamental role in helping to define, for all of us in society, what it means to be a woman, because their testosterone limits determine who can compete in women’s athletics,” Anyangwe says.

Anyangwe credits her international upbringing, having lived in dozens of countries from Cameroon to the Netherlands to the Seychelles and the US, with giving her a perspective that adds value to her work.

“I have felt both a deep kind of connection to lots of different places and parts of the world but also very much felt like I don’t belong anywhere,” she says. “Having that sort of outside perspective has allowed me to see other stories and really be committed to telling those other stories.”

💳   CNN insider rec of the week

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🗓️ mark your calendars

📚 Learn: Black History Month begins next week. Explore these lesser-known African American men and women who transformed America in a profound way.

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💻 Watch: CNN’s Brian Stelter visits a classroom in New York City where a teacher is showing her students how to spot misinformation online.

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– Written and edited by Beryl Adcock, Tricia Escobedo, Melissa Mahtani and Jessica Sooknanan