In his welcome address to the participants at the seminar, the Secretary General of the KUJ, Erick Charles Oduor, said that KUJ has opened its doors to all freelance journalists to join the union in order to help them defend their rights and welfare. ‘Initially, our Constitution did not allow freelance journalists and correspondents to join our union. However this was changed in 2016 and further amended in 2020 allowing more freelance journalists and correspondents to join the KUJ’. "KUJ," he added, "has the capacity to reach out to freelance journalists in all the regions of the country and will work to design campaign strategies that are specifically designed to recruit freelance journalists. We have already set out a target for ourselves to increase our numbers by next year."
The President of the Association of Freelance Journalists (AFJ) in Kenya, Winnie Kamau, said that many freelance journalists do not have resources such as cameras and recorders to facilitate their work. ‘For most of us the contracts that we signed with the media houses are not honoured and we lack the power to negotiate for better pay for our stories. The contracts have no indication concerning the number of hours or days that we work either does it provide any form of safety or protection plan in case a freelance journalist encounters danger while engaging in an assignment’. This mostly affects freelance investigative journalists who are mostly exposed to very serious threats. She added that female freelance journalists are also sexually harassed from sources on the ground.
The Director of the IFJ Africa Office, Pa Louis Thomasi in his solidarity statement said that freelance journalists are often too detached from the unions and this is mostly due to their lack of awareness concerning the mandate and capacities of the union. ‘Freelance journalists are largely exploited by media owners simply because they are not unionised’. He emphasised that only unions have the power to negotiate collective agreements and called on freelance journalists to join the KUJ in order to put a stop to the ruthless cycle of exploitation that they have been trapped into by media owners. Thomasi called on the KUJ to include freelance journalists in their safety programmes and to continue to assist them legally despite the fact that most of them are yet to be members of the union.
The two –day seminar dealt with various themes including the working conditions of freelance journalists in Kenya, gender equality and ILO Convention 190, safety and security of freelance journalists, freedom of association, the right to organise and collective bargaining, challenges facing female freelance journalists working online and designing campaigns for the recruitment of freelance journalists.