Media in low-income countries - who control the agenda
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Today’s story isn’t particularly new or groundbreaking. The impact of foreign aid on dependent countries’ functioning is one of the biggest economic and political long-term debates and my personal point of interest and research. Though I have never previously come across anything about the relationships between aid and media in dependant on aid countries. An article by Prue Clarke for Deutsche Welle Akademie made me think about it and discover some disturbing information. How international development agencies form a daily local news agenda and use local journalists for donor purposes while at the same time being the only source of funding for some publications. As often the debate around aid efficiency is very controversial, no one is guilty and no one is a winner, all agents do what they can to sustain themselves and move forward. However, the solutions exist, as examples of how to find a good balance to make everyone benefit from the good work. So here is what I found.
What is the story?
It is not a secret the amount of foreign aid sent to low-income countries is tremendous and growing every year (data shows US$152.8 billion in 2019 was spent just by OECD countries). However, it is also not news that despite such amounts spent on countless projects developed by international and local experts, the efficiency of aid is still questionable and raises hot debates.
Media assistance accounts for on average 0.3% of total official development aid between 2010 and 2015. According to the estimates in this report, it represents about $454 million per year.
How sufficient this amount is hard to judge. Some say that “an enormous and increasing portion of the foreign development aid coming into Africa annually is for media development.” At the same time when put into real figures per publication, it looks less convincing: “Most media development funding per country tends to be, at best, a few million dollars. When USAID, the world’s largest media development donor, targeted the Balkans with a major investigative journalism initiative, the amount totaled just $6 million over six years.”
Even when funding finds its way to the newsroom the challenge continues. While all over the world the news media landscape and journalism practices are going through changes and experiencing hard times surviving the “collapse of familiar business models”, in the context of low-income countries the problem of financial dependency from external sources poses a real threat for the independent “watchdog” journalistic practices.
Even though some studies claim that usually donors fund projects “ that aim to strengthen the media’s contribution to good governance in some way or another”, there is only a tiny fraction (if any) of funds that really goes to address “unique challenges of press freedom in the digital age”.
Declarations of international donors about the importance “of protecting independent media for the sake of democracy and development” are convincing, in practice, it gives the following picture:
Reality shows that aid for the media brings unfair competition from development groups to the emerging media markets, allowing them to push their agenda and advertise their projects.
What is also not helping is what some studies find about donor countries’ objectives for the beneficiaries of media funding - one study in Ghana claims it found an “implicit intent of the aid country of origin to use the media as agents of economic and cultural diplomacy”.
Sadly when journalism becomes a tool to spread disinformation - nobody wins.
However other reports say that despite the harm that the Western agenda brings to the emerging media markets, journalists worry that “without foreign financial support, critical journalism in their countries would vanish.”
Why care?
The situation is worsening with the massive rise of Chinese media involvement in Africa in recent years. Some data shows that there is nearly $2.1 billion worth of China-financed projects in the media sectors of developing countries. It clearly exceeds the total cumulative aid of US and EU countries.
Still, it is relevant not only for the media sector. It’s widely known that China is coming to the African continent with a lot of development projects and tremendous funding with the goal of strengthening the relationships and at the same time settling down on the continent with its own agenda in mind.
The situation is alarming because the Chinese media model is drastically different from the Western. More often called propaganda, Chinese media follow a more persuasive tone and favor official perspectives. Moreover, they take a “critical view of the history of Western involvement in Africa”.
What to do?
As an action today I suggest supporting independent media .. all over the world. And there are a few examples of innovative, smart, and brave projects that thrive in Africa already:
Premium Times in Nigeria
Front Page Africa in Liberia
South Africa’s Mail & Guardian
Joy FM in Ghana
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