Media Action Insight Blog Feed

Media freedom and rethinking support to independent media

2019-05-01T09:00:00+00:00

At �� Media Action we are dedicated to the cause of media freedom – the principle that expression and communication through media is a right that should be exercised freely -which is at the very core of effective democracies and inclusive societies. This freedom can never be taken for granted, and cannot be exercised in many places around the world.

This World Press Freedom Day commemorates another dark year, with precipitous plunges in rankings on media freedom indices and increasing – and increasingly egregious – attacks on journalists, most notably the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

Independent, sustainable public interest media are increasingly threatened, not just by laws and politics, but also by economics and the sheer pace of technological change. Each day, we see media co-opted by the powerful, and challenged to secure income that comes without strings attached, especially as more and more advertising revenue becomes concentrated in the pockets of those with a powerful hold over online eyeballs and clicks.

This crisis faced by public interest media, particularly in resource poor settings, is so great that we at �� Media Action are working hard to apply fresh thinking, advance new strategies and mobilise substantial new resources to address it.

�� Journalist, Hassan Arouni, interviewing members of the community in Sierra Leone

For 20 years, we have supported media freedom and strengthened media in fragile and developing countries, working with partners to develop conditions and skills in support of independent media which meet public needs and provide space for constructive public dialogue. Our work is rooted in the values and mission of the �� in its focus on supporting independent media that is trusted, can engage as many parts of society as possible, and that works in the public interest. Our expertise spans financial sustainability; creative, editorial and production capabilities; governance and regulatory environments; and supporting networks to help build media’s resilience to political pressures.

In the last six years alone, we’ve supported independent media to enable informed public debate around more than ten elections, reaching over 124 million people. And we have some great success stories to share from our work with our partners around the world, in some very challenging contexts.

In Southern Iraq, public service broadcaster Radio Al Mirbad has grown from its founding in 2005 into a fully independent, highly influential local entity, supported by our distance mentoring, production and editorial advice. Some 81% of its weekly audience agree that Al Mirbad follows up and monitors the work of government, and 86% agree that it speaks for Iraqi citizens. The dedicated YouTube channel for its popular satirical videos has more than four million subscribers and 850 million lifetime views.

Community voices in Iraq- Al Mirbad

In Zambia, we have been working with local independent radio stations since 2011, to help them strengthen their capacity and improve their sustainability and community impact. Recent research shows that people who listened regularly to these radio programmes and outdoor debates on local issues were significantly more likely to feel that they could positively influence their community’s politics and governance issues over those who did not listen.

Mentoring programme in Zambia

In Tanzania, Haba na Haba (Slowly But Surely) is the nation’s most widely broadcast radio show. We produce this national, accountability-focused programme with local broadcast partners, who in turn make their own sister shows, each with their own brands and social media presence, which add around 500,000 listeners to the overall Haba na Haba audience, which now stands at 5 million people. These shows are now largely financially self-sustaining. Our team of mentors and producers are supporting these partners to prepare for the ultimate handover of the large national show, by building production skills and improving their commercial viability.

Haba na Haba community discussion

But despite the real significance of these successes, we believe that new ways of working in - and thinking about - media development are critical to turn the tide in favour of genuinely independent public interest media. Multi-level change and new alliances are needed to help build the skills, management structures and financial models required to support high-quality, balanced, independent editorial content. So, too, are supportive regulatory and legal reforms, paired with political will at all levels to call out repression of free media and abuses against journalists.

Donor support in this space is critical too - both to help address market failures and support the discovery and application of new media support strategies, fit for a changing world. And donors need to be armed with better information about how, where and when their support can be most effectively channelled.

The challenges remain immense. Alongside political attacks on media, the economic environment for independent public interest media is increasingly hostile, to the extent that in many fragile and resource poor settings, a market model barely exists. Cognisant of these challenges, in recent months we’ve been actively working with local, national and international organisations to explore how – together - we might do media development differently, and better.

What we think needs to change

We believe that media development must be clearly guided by locally-led, systems-wide strategies, rooted in robust market analysis. Bringing local actors together to identify key challenges and ways forward through structured, participatory processes is a critical first step. Multi-disciplinary expertise is then required to address the challenges identified on the ground, bringing in players from the private as well as not-for-profit sectors. At �� Media Action, we are more committed than ever to playing our part in forming and collaborating with open and diverse partnerships to drive change.

We also need to do more to make sure that these strategies grapple with the tensions inherent in delivering media support in media landscapes fragmented by the unequal pace of technological change. Platforms that are trusted sources of information are no longer always the same as those capable of convening constructive public debate. To address this, in any context, we need to focus on supporting media partners who can do both. We also need to find ways to reach poor and marginalised audiences with public interest media now, whilst also devising approaches fit for purpose in a rapidly changing digital age.

Turbo-charging learning in this sector is critical too. While project level impact data and sharing on the effectiveness of media development initiatives have improved significantly in recent years, a clear evidence base on enabling financial viability and political resilience of independent media is sparse, especially in fragile and resource-poor settings. This evidence gap is widening as the environments in which independent media operates deteriorates, and exacerbated by a lack of opportunity to share evidence and then apply it to practical work on the ground. At �� Media Action we want to do more to address this. One strategy we are actively pursuing with partners and donors is the establishment of a Media Development Lab, to substantially accelerate learning and sharing of learning in this field.

Finally, as well as helping to build the commercial viability of our local media partners we are arguing strongly for continued and committed international support to media development, in part through a Global Fund for Public Interest Media. With funding from Luminate, we are now carrying out a feasibility study, working in close collaboration with partners carrying out other international policy initiatives designed to further the critical cause of free, public interest around the world.

On World Press Freedom Day, we all feel keenly the threats posed to media freedom. Together we need to mark successes while committing to rethinking media support, to ensure that resilient, viable and independent media survive and thrive in this increasingly challenging landscape.

5 steps to enable health workers to better meet the needs of hard-to-reach communities

2019-04-05T14:05:00+00:00

As World Health Day approaches, and as we look towards the first-ever UN High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage later this year, we’re sharing insights from �� Media Action’s work to help health workers and communities work better together to build a healthier world.

In low-income countries in Africa and Asia, many health systems are staffed by community health workers. In Nepal they are known as Female Community Health Volunteers, in Ethiopia, Health Extension Workers, while in India and Bangladesh they are generally known as Frontline Health Workers.

Whilst the names may differ, most are women, most work in remote areas, and many are volunteers. They play a vital role connecting people to, and sometimes providing, basic primary care; referring patients to clinical services and motivating families to adopt heathier practices.

All are tasked with communicating about health, but often they lack sufficient training or engaging communication tools that would help them do this more effectively.

This is where �� Media Action comes in. Over the last 10 years we’ve been supporting community health workers to better meet the needs of their communities. These are five important things we have learned in the process:

First, understand the world health workers live and work in

In Nepal, access to communities can be extremely challenging for Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHVs) due to large distances and difficult terrain between communities and health centres in rural areas. What’s more, FCHVs are often balancing their responsibilities with looking after family and, as many of them are volunteers, trying to earn an income.

Whilst access to mobile networks and internet is increasing, literacy rates remain low in rural areas and our research shows that some communities feel FCHVs should know more than they currently do. It became evident that updated training and tools that fit with the practicalities of FCHVs’ day-to-day lives and the changing community needs would help.

Most FCHVs have access to a basic mobile phone and mobile network, so we’re now working with our partners to explore how training and tools for basic mobile phones will help them to carry out their duties in remote areas. We’re also developing creative printed materials to support their interaction with people of all literacy levels in their communities.

In a similar project in Bangladesh, we discovered that health workers were using heavy, cumbersome flip charts to visit their clients in urban slums, so we developed a mobile app to help them undertake their roles more effectively.

“Now I’m getting all the topics by using one app which is not possible with other tools (flash cards, flip charts, leaflets). I can deliver all relevant information by the app which was difficult for me before” said one community health worker who frequently used the app.

Second, use human centred design and build partnerships

In rural India, the catalyst for the development of our highly successful Mobile Kunji and Mobile Academy projects was women’s lack of access to traditional mass media platforms. At the start of this work, our formative research showed that only a few women watched television or listened to the radio, however 82% had access to some form of basic mobile phone. So, rather than setting up a parallel system, �� Media Action leveraged the one available.

Using human centred design, our India team created content that worked on basic mobile phones and suited how health workers used them – to make and receive calls only. We created Mobile Academy, a training course for health workers, which is delivered through mobile audio messages, whilst Mobile Kunji is a set of visual cards and accompanying mobile audio messages that health workers can use during visits with families. Using these services and tools, our research has shown that health workers are able to better reach, engage, and influence families to improve their health.

These projects have not only worked, but they’ve shown sustainability. By working in partnership with the state governments in Bihar, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh, we’ve trained 263,000 health workers so far on Mobile Kunji and about 260,000 people have completed the Mobile Academy course.

Mobile Academy is now active in 13 states and we recently transitioned responsibility for the service to the Indian Government to continue its vital work long into the future.

Third, create relatable and accurate content to help to build trust

In Bangladesh we learnt that community health workers were struggling to communicate effectively about sexual health to young women and men, which limited the impact of their advice.

So we developed a smartphone app. It shows Dr Natasha, a real doctor, talking about some of the key sexual, reproductive, and maternal and child health issues their clients were facing. By using appropriate language tailored to their audiences, we made sure the content was relatable, accessible, and engaging – which mattered especially in areas with low literacy levels.

Our research showed us that health workers felt more trusted by their clients and were more successful in persuading them to adopt healthier practices, such as attending antenatal care visits. As one of the health workers described, “Most of my clients were not interested in listening to my suggestions before using the job aid. But now they are convinced as they see there is symmetry between Dr Natasha’s information and my own”.

We found the app also helped to give them credibility to dispel myths around issues such as contraception and family planning.

Fourth, go beyond training on health topics and train on how to communicate

Community health workers cover a wide variety of health issues on their visits. Our research often reveals the benefits of refreshing or deepening their knowledge, but also of them gaining new skills on how to communicate within a family setting. We found in remote parts of Ethiopia, communicating with the men in the family is often overlooked because family health is still seen as a woman’s responsibility.

So we ran training for Health Extension Workers which focused on how to create safer feeding and playing spaces for children under three, during which participants learned how to communicate effectively with, and actively involve, both women and men in the families.

We found role play really helped during training because it encouraged Health Extension Workers to practise how to have compelling two-way conversations.

And finally, break down the barriers between communities and health workers

Mistrust and suspicion between communities and health workers is common in many of the places we work. Through our research, we often hear about these difficulties and then aim to create safe spaces for communities and health workers to come together, get to know each other, and discuss often sensitive issues.

In Nigeria we facilitate discussions around polio vaccinations and routine immunisation as part of our community drama radio recordings which are performed in front of a live audience. And, working with different partners, we accompany women during antenatal care check-ups to record what happens. By sharing real-life experiences in our radio programmes, it helps to build understanding and trust in health services amongst the public.

In Tanzania, we trained and worked with radio partners to facilitate lively community events that were recorded and broadcast in weekly radio shows to audiences across the country. The events were designed to build understanding about maternal and newborn health issues and encourage interaction with health workers. By facilitating conversations, we found people gained understanding and confidence to access health services. We also saw increased male engagement in maternal and newborn health care.

Looking forward

In summary, we’ve learnt to not only help build the skills and confidence of community health workers, but also to help improve engagement between them and members of their communities. Through creative communication and human centred design, it is possible to create more effective tools fit for the difficult environments health workers operate in. And in doing so, we’re able to help health workers and communities work better together.

Informed by our experience, �� Media Action plans to continue this important work towards the UHC2030 global movement, to build stronger health systems for people around the world.

Emebet Wuhib-Mutungi and Genevieve Hutchinson
Senior Health Advisors for �� Media Action
On Twitter: @ewuhib / @genevieveh77

The projects featured in this blog were carried out in conjunction with: national government ministries and departments of health, DFID, UNICEF, The Gates Foundation, UNFPA, Options, Abt Associates, Viamo, Care International, the Grameen Foundation and our media partners.

Five questions our data portal can help answer

2017-04-04T06:00:00+00:00

There's a lack of data on what ordinary people think, feel and want in developing countries. Our new Data Portal aims to help fix that. Sonia Whitehead runs through five questions the portal can help answer on governance, media and resilience.

The development world is all aflutter about data. There’s much talk of a data revolution, the sector’s hiring data scientists and the World Bank just launched a new podcast to ‘data crunch the world’.

Not to dampen all this excitement but we need a lot more data about people in the Global South before it can become a transformative force there. Addressing this lack of data will speed up progress on everything from gender to alleviating poverty.

Enter our new Data Portal (view on desktop), which brings together data, reports and visualisations from surveys conducted in 13 developing countries that there aren't a lot of statistics about. Over five years, we asked more than 75,000 (rarely polled) people about what they think, feel and want. The portal covers a range of issues from what they’re most worried about to how interested they are in politics.

We want these insights to help development leaders, practitioners and researchers better understand ordinary people in the developing world so they can produce more effective strategies, projects and communications.

To mark the launch of the portal, we run through five questions that it can help answer on governance, media and resilience, while also showcasing the different types of content available on the portal.

1. What sources of information do people trust?

Being a media organisation, we wanted to know whether people believe what they hear on the airwaves, see on TV and read online. We found that trust levels in radio are universally high, at over 80% in Kenya, Nigeria and Myanmar, and reaching 90% in Nepal.

However, people are more circumspect about the truthfulness of the internet, with the Burmese especially sceptical, which is concerning given that half of Myanmar's internet users say they go online in order to read the news.

To illustrate these (and other) insights into what media people think of different sources of information, we produced a series of visualisations – some of the ones for Kenya are previewed below (media visual available here, governance one here):

2. How free do people feel to speak their minds?

We asked people in three Asian countries (Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal), four African countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania) and the Palestinian territories whether they could 'say what they think'. A majority felt at least somewhat free to speak their minds in all but one of the countries: Myanmar.

But across the eight countries in our governance data set, we found that many people don’t feel they can criticise those in charge. Around a third of Kenyans, Sierra Leoneans, Bangladeshis and Palestinians ‘feel people like them are free to talk negatively about the government in public’; in Tanzania and Myanmar this drops to under one in four.

Nepal is the only place we looked at where a majority (65%) feel at least somewhat able to criticise those in charge. Nigerians are the next most comfortable with openly complaining about their leaders, a little over 40% say they could – though only half that number felt very liberated to do so.

3. Who are the keenest voters?

In six countries, we also asked whether people had voted in the last general election: Bangladesh, Myanmar, Palestine, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Nigeria.

Sierra Leone came out top, with 90% reporting having voted in the last general election, closely followed by Myanmar at 87% and Tanzania at 86%. (A quick note – we conducted our Burmese survey in 2016, after the victory of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in 2015.)

Turnout was lowest in Bangladesh and the Palestinian territories, where 42% and 45% respectively said they’d cast a ballot in the last national election.

Of course, people don’t just get involved with public life through voting. Meetings, protests, and various forms of communication are all types of political participation. The Sierra Leone visualisation previewed below shows that while only a small proportion of people have been in touch with government officials, nearly two thirds have teamed up with others in their community to solve a problem.

4. How do people feel about those who are different to them?

Historically, Kenya has been the site of ethnicity-based politics and violence. Yet even against this background, well over 80% of Kenyans want to live with people from other ethnic groups and think it's important to know about different cultures and what life is like for those who are different to them (see below).

In a country with over 100 ethnic groups, 97% of people in Myanmar believe that peace relies on mutual respect between people from different ethnic, religious and social groups. Similarly in Nigeria – which has wrestled with religious divides – nine tenths of the population believe that people from different backgrounds have ‘more in common than they think’.

However, a large majority of both Nigerians and Burmese feel that some differences between groups are ‘just too difficult to overcome’.

5. How are people adapting to environmental change?

Building on our Climate Asia project – which examined 33,500 people’s everyday experiences of climate change – we’ve more recently asked Tanzanians and Bangladeshis about how they’re coping with changes to the world around them.

In the drought-ridden areas of Dodoma and Morogoro in Tanzania, more people think agricultural productivity has decreased than increased over the past ten years. They are split as to whether rainfall is higher or lower than it was a decade ago.

Getting their information predominantly from the radio, Tanzanians are making some – though not a lot – of changes in light of the environmental challenges they face. Popular responses include keeping food for longer and finding new water supplies.

In Bangladesh, rainfall, temperatures and extreme weather are all commonly seen to have increased in the past decade. TV is the country's go-to medium for getting information about water, food, energy and extreme weather, considerably more so than the radio, newspaper, friends and family.

Around a third of the population have changed how they live in response to environmental changes; swapping jobs is the most common way of shaking things up.

In addition to all of the data, the portal also hosts a number of other resources:

For extra guidance on navigating the portal, take a look at our ‘How-to’ section, as well as our ‘walkthrough’ and ‘running a query’ videos.

Those interested in how we collected the data should refer to the methodologies and questionnaires available on the right-hand sidebar of each of the thematic pages (media, governance, resilience).

The portal is also home to reports which summarise and analyse data available on the portal. For example, we've produced a report exploring how to better connect with the least politically engaged Kenyans. This is just a flavour of what’s to come, similar reports analysing our governance data in other countries will follow in the coming months.

On each thematic page, there are reports and tools to support practitioners to use media for development. For example, we’ve featured the communication toolkit from our Climate Asia project, which includes a guide on how to talk about climate change in an accessible and engaging way, as well as a set of cards (with instructions) for co-creating a communication strategy with partners and your target audience.

Sonia Whitehead is �� Media Action's Head of Research Programmes, overseeing research across Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

What are the challenges facing young people in East Africa?

2016-11-03T14:05:48+00:00

Alasdair Stuart shares the challenges faced by young people in Tanzania, Somalia and Kenya and outlines how they themselves think the media can help.

“Life becomes better for just a few – your neighbour owns ten cars but you don’t even own a bicycle.” (Arusha, Tanzania)

“Adults, the government, businessmen and parents have no confidence in us to bring new ideas or trust us in doing thing.” (Puntland, Somalia)

“Extremist groups are an option for some young people because they are fed up with the hardships of life.” (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania)

These are just some of the things young people in East Africa told us when we asked them about the challenges they face. Speaking to over 400 young people over the course of 42 focus group discussions held in Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania, it became clear that they had to contend with an array of difficult feelings, perceptions and environments.

What do young people think are the main obstacles in their lives?

Many young people find themselves caught in a prolonged period of stagnation (‘waithood’) between adolescence and adulthood. They are unable to reach the milestones of adulthood, such as moving out of the parental home, having a secure job, enjoying financial security or being in a position to support a family of their own. Young people told us they struggle to get ahead in life because of unemployment, a lack of access to education, poverty, corruption and nepotism.

Not only do young people feel unable to achieve what society expects of an ‘adult’ or realise their own ambitions, they also feel disenfranchised and frustrated with the political system. They also have the sense that they are largely excluded from decision-making processes, neglected by politicians and unable to do anything to address the issues they face because there are too many barriers in the way. These factors all combine together to fuel a crisis of youth identity.

Within all three countries, there was also evidence of a growing sense of an inter-generational ‘divide’. Young people feel that the older generation deny them access to opportunities, stop them having a say in how society is run and generally look down on them, while some older people view young people as apathetic or ‘trouble-makers’.

Our research also revealed societal divisions that exacerbate feelings of marginalisation and discrimination and fuel ‘us and them’ narratives. For example, young Somalis reported having to navigate a number of divisions, based on tribes, clans and different regional identities (Somaliland, Puntland and South Central). In Tanzania, there were rifts between supporters of the ruling and opposition parties. Kenyans experienced splits along religious, ethnic and tribal lines, with Muslim, Somali and Somali-Kenyan communities feeling marginalised and discriminated against.

In addition, young people live in societies in which violence (including criminal violence committed by gangs, political violence, ‘mob justice’ and gender-based violence) is increasingly normal. We were told that violence was common in communities and that young people were frequently exposed to it – and sometimes participated in it.

What solutions are young people pursuing and why?

In such environments – where economic and political opportunities are limited – violence is a ‘way of life’ for some young people. It allows them to carve out an identity and an income, in a context that otherwise frustrates such efforts. Life was seen as so difficult for some young people that their peers understood why they might turn to ‘illegitimate’ means of improving their situation, such as criminal gangs, illegal migration or ‘violent extremist’ groups. These options represented some of the only viable, rational and financially prudent ways of getting ahead.

Interestingly, almost all young people felt that the key reason someone would join a violent extremist group would be either economic (such groups provide ‘employment’ and far greater financial reward than is otherwise available) or due to dissatisfaction with the political system. Young males were thought to be more vulnerable to becoming involved in violent extremism than females, as they were seen to place more value on financial security and employment. Religion was not thought to be a significant motivating factor for most East Africans who join an extremist group.

What alternatives do young people think the media can offer?

To an extent, the media contributes to and perpetuates some of the challenges facing young people. Modern communication and global media have created ‘unrealistic’ lifestyle aspirations that many young people feel they fail to meet. Some of those we spoke to also felt that media coverage often lacks balance, scapegoats certain groups and glamorises violence, further worsening the societal divisions and normalisation of violence mentioned above.

The young people we spoke to would like the media to feature positive but realistic role models of young people who have managed to find legitimate routes to success. In a similar vein, they would also like the media to provide useful and practical information to help them take advantage of the opportunities that do exist; for example, by offering advice on their rights, accessing employment support and how to start a business. Ultimately, young people want a media that provides concrete advice, rather than just rhetoric that fails to address the obstacles they face.

They want a media that gives them a voice, helps them to have their concerns addressed and holds leaders accountable for improving their situation. They want the older generation to understand their challenges and involve them in addressing them, and they think the media can play a role in making this happen. Can the media play a role in fulfilling these expectations, and contribute to a more positive future for East African youth? The answer remains to be seen.

Alasdair Stuart is a Research Manager at �� Media Action. Alasdair managed the research across East Africa for this project, and currently manages �� Media Action’s portfolio of research across Somalia, Kenya and Zambia.