Winner of the 2024
One World Media
Press Freedom Award

For their courage in challenging taboos and bringing new stories to light in one of the most dangerous palaces to be a journalist: https://oneworldmedia.org.uk/latest/highlights-from-the-36th-one-world-media-awards-ceremony/

Bilan Media is Somalia’s only all-women media team

Telling the stories we want to tell in the way we want to tell them

“What a privilege to meet this brave team of journalists telling new stories & telling them so well. #Somalia.”

— Lyse Doucet, BBC Chief International Correspondent

Bilan in the news

“Thanks for having me do a masterclass for Team Bilan. More excellent women journalists, covering stories affecting women in the whole region, is exactly what's needed.”

— Rageh Omaar, presenter, ITV

A team that can make a difference

“Great to speak to this stellar group of pioneering women journalists and hope they get many commissions from editors far and wide.”

— Mishal Husain, presenter, BBC News at Ten and Today Programme

Bilan on film

“It was my pleasure to talk with the excellent young journalists of @MediaBilan.”

— Lindsey Hilsum, international editor, Channel 4 News

Internship programme

Bilan's internship programme offers a way for recent journalism graduates to take their first steps in this challenging career in a supportive and highly professional environment.

They have the chance to work part time for six months at the Bilan offices, producing stories with Bilan's team of journalists and joining masterclasses and other training opportunities.

“Bilan’s insights, storytelling ability and sheer existence have the potential to inform and inspire us all.”

— Anna Holligan, foreign correspondent, BBC

Reporting highlights

  • Inside the beauty pageant in one of the world’s worst places to be a woman

    BBC
  • The dilemma of displaced women in Mogadishu

    TRT
  • The Global South needs more female journalists

  • The inspiring women of Somalia

  • Somalia's football pitch that doubles as an execution ground

    BBC
  • How failed migrants thrive and contribute to development back home

    TRT
  • ‘The river took it all’: Somalis wait for waters to recede as floods kill dozens

  • Somalis with albinism: Pelted with stones and raw eggs

    BBC
  • Shunned and homeless: Living with HIV in Somalia

  • Menstruation education urgently needed in schools (in Somali)

  • It’s dangerous being a female journalist in Somalia. But, one year on, we are still shining our light

  • What’s driving some Somali mothers to poison their babies?

  • Mothers ‘rent out’ babies for begging and poison their children to survive drought in Somalia

  • ‘I poison my children in order to survive’: The terrible toll of Somalia’s drought

  • Challenging taboos in Somalia: the young female farmers studying agriculture and farming

  • Women are expected to keep their mouths shut here in Somalia. But not any more

  • Somalia's opioid overdose: Young, female and addicted

    BBC
  • Race against time to vaccinate against measles in Somalia (in Spanish)