Stories on the Move, a media training programme on gender-responsive migration reporting convened by UN Women South Africa in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), concluded its second and final leg in Johannesburg from 20-21 August 2026. The two-day engagement brought together journalists and key experts to examine how South African newsrooms frame one of the country’s most contested policy issues, following an initial session held in Cape Town on 17 and 18 August 2026.
The first day opened with a session on migration trends, narratives and realities in South Africa before moving into a discussion on gender, migration and intersectionality, a session that pressed participants to examine how race, class, nationality and gender combine to shape a migrant woman’s experience differently from a migrant man’s. A further session addressed how journalists can move from bias and stereotype toward reporting that reflects those intersecting realities rather than flattening them into a single migration narrative. The sessions were built around the experiences and voices of migrant women themselves, followed by a session on ethical, trauma-informed and survivor centred journalism, a growing requirement for reporters covering displacement and gender based violence in border communities.
According to Aleta Miller, UN Women South Africa Representative, the stories of women migrants remain significantly underreported despite the scale of the challenges they face. Miller noted that the barriers confronting women migrants and the urgency surrounding these issues demand greater media attention. She further noted that critical dimensions of women’s participation across the economy, including forced migration, labour migration and economic migration, remain underexplored. “The eyes of the world are firmly fixed on South Africa’s migration policies and stories. This is the time to report on these burning issues,” said Miller.
UN Women South Africa Programme Specialist for the Making Migration Safe for Women (MMS) programme , Siziwe Jongizulu underscored the scale of the issue, noting that women constitute half of the world’s migrant population, making migration safety a pressing priority. Jongizulu leads and manages initiatives under the MMS programme in South Africa, with her work focused on improving gender-disaggregated data and protecting the rights of migrant women. She outlined the gendered risks women face during migration, including trafficking, sexual and gender-based violence, exploitation, abuse and limited access to essential services—reinforcing the need for targeted empowerment initiatives for female migrants. Citing data from the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), Jongizulu reported that women account for 1.2 million migrants in South Africa, with the highest concentrations in Gauteng and the Western Cape, followed by Limpopo. She also addressed the importance of gender equality, intersectionality and precise migration terminology as essential considerations in effectively addressing the challenges facing women migrants.
The second day turned toward the practical end of the craft, opening with a session by IOM’s Regional Spokesperson and Head of Communication, Yvonne Ndege, on data-driven migration storytelling. Ndege walked participants through the “data-to-story” journey, why evidence matters, how to source and visualise it for maximum impact, and how to combine credible, factual data with narrative and qualitative context to surface the story behind the numbers. “Evidence strengthens stories. Start with the question, make information transparent, visualise it and make the stories human, usable and contextualised for responsible interpretation,” said Ndege. She added that data helps balance migration reporting with lived experience, using it to highlight gender stories, show what’s happening on the ground and amplify the voices of migrant women. The session was followed by one addressing misinformation, hate speech and online harm, landing squarely amid a year in which anti-migrant sentiment in South Africa has hardened into sustained street mobilisation.
What the agenda does not name directly, yet what several sessions gesture toward, is a story that remains stubbornly under told in South African and regional business journalism, namely the position of women within the labour migration systems that built and continue to sustain the mining economy. South Africa’s mines were constructed on a century of contract labour drawn from Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi and Mozambique, a system that for decades excluded women from underground work entirely under a 1935 International Labour Organization (ILO) convention South Africa only denounced in 1996. The legacy of that exclusion persists in the data. Women accounted for roughly 56,691 of South Africa’s mining workforce of close to 455,000 people as of 2019, still only about one in eight jobs in an industry now reporting measurable safety and productivity gains where female representation has grown.
Labour migration statistics tell a parallel and largely unreported story about who moves and what they find on arrival. Statistics South Africa’s most recent migration report shows that among immigrants aged 15 to 64, close to 46% of men were employed compared with roughly 18% of women and that women migrants were concentrated disproportionately in informal work rather than the formal sector positions more likely to carry contracts, benefits and legal protection. Most immigrants in South Africa continue to originate from within the SADC region itself, meaning the women most exposed to this employment gap are frequently the wives, daughters and independent economic migrants from the very countries that once supplied the mines with male contract labour, now navigating a very different and far less regulated set of pathways into spaza shops, domestic work, cross border trade and informal settlements around mining towns.
That vulnerability has been thrown into sharp relief by the anti-migrant unrest that has spread across South Africa through 2026, from Mossel Bay to Pietermaritzburg, where women and children from Malawi were among those queuing for buses home after informal settlements were targeted and businesses burned. Researchers who study xenophobic violence in South Africa’s secondary cities and mining adjacent towns have found that migrant owned informal enterprises, the very businesses through which many migrant women build an independent economic foothold, are disproportionately targeted during unrest, compounding an already uneven starting position with the risk of losing what little has been built.
The gap the training implicitly names is one of sourcing as much as framing. Data on gendered labour migration into mining regions is collected by Stats SA and international bodies, yet rarely disaggregated in ways that let a reporter trace a woman’s economic journey from origin country through informal settlement to, in rare cases, formal employment on a mine or in its supply chain. Academic research into gender diversity within mining companies exists, as does research into xenophobia’s economic toll and into the local employment effects of mine openings and closures on women left to shift between agriculture and informal services as their male partners move into mining work. What is missing is the connective journalism that draws these strands together into the kind of accessible, human-centred reporting the Johannesburg training spent two days trying to model: coverage that follows women not as passive figures in a migration crisis but as economic actors whose movement, labour and resilience have quietly underwritten one of the region’s most important industries.
