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Strategic Media Alliance 3: Partnerships & Mutual Capacity Development Copy Copy

SM3: Partnerships & Mutual Capacity Development

Developing a successful NGOs-media partnership is never easy. It requires long-term trust, honesty, and commitment from both ends. For the low-level partnership, it requires both sides to devote themselves to developing mutual understanding, sharing information, influencing each other, and facilitating joint actions. The higher requirement for the partnership is to cultivate a culture of mutual capacity development and learning for long-term growth and prosperity.  

OECD-DAC defined capacity development as follows: ‘Capacity development is understood as the process whereby people, organizations, and society as a whole unleash, strengthen, create, adapt and maintain capacity over time.’ Capacity itself is understood as ‘the ability of people, organizations and society as a whole to manage their affairs successfully’.  

Mutual capacity development entails investing in sustainable NGOs-media relationships built on trust, equality and mutual respect. It means engaging in an effective process of active learning and doing together – strengthening each other’s skills, knowledge and network contacts, taking joint, complementary actions, and maximising each other’s strengths and addressing each other’s weaknesses. 

Key features of mutual capacity development 

  • Mutual respect and the belief that the partnership will serve the common goals of NGOs and media 
  • Commitment to a long-term relationship with the support of the management team from both sides. 
  • Effective, consistent and collective strategies. 
  • Develop and implement collaborative cross-sector programmes, projects, products, and services together 
  • Advocate the positive changes of policies on shared agendas and/or agendas important to each other.  

What can the development sector offer to media organisations? 

  • Covering SDGs 
  • Monitoring progress made on the 2030 SDGs agenda 
  • Ensuring accountability 
  • Human rights principles 
  • Deeper knowledge of contextualised social problems 

NGOs and CSOs are at the frontline of implementing SDGs and defending human rights. The media has to be capacitated in covering SDGs, including monitoring progress made on the 2030 Agenda and ensuring accountability for commitments made by the government. NGOs and CSOs can provide capacity development to media and new media professionals on SDGs reporting, human rights principles, norms, country and/or community context on specific topics etc, ultimately supporting their role as agents of change. Those capacity developments can help media professionals to gain deeper knowledge on contextualized social problems, SDGs reporting or human rights-based journalism, so they can produce more appealing and engaging stories.  

What can media organisations offer to the development sector? 

  • Digital media and communication literacy 
  • Develop strategies to reach broader audiences 
  • Use data analytics to understand how audiences consume information 
  • Create engaging stories to pursue change 
  • Reporting and campaigning strategies 

On the contrary, the NGOs and CSOs have to be capacitated in digital media and communication literacy, including ensuring the messages reached the right audience for awareness raising and building public support to reinforce positive norms and values. As the expert in communication, media can train NGOs and CSOs on a range of topics on digital media and communication skills, such as storytelling, vlogging, blogging, podcasting, data visualization, digital marketing etc.  

Possible Activities for Mutual Capacity Development 

Training

On the job coaching

Consultancy

Joint advocacy

Joint research

Joint campaigning

For longer joint projects we have developed a methodology that is both co-creative and iterative, which means it is in a constant state of revision and improvement.  

CASE STUDY – Justice4her  As a member of RNW Media’s global network, the Justice4her project is a cross-sector project that aims to strengthen rule of law to reduce gender-based violence (GBV) against Chinese female migrant workers. The stories Chinese media reporting on GBV contain lots of misleading information and gender stereotypes, such as victims/survivors blaming and disrespect for the privacy of victims/survivors, which always lead to ‘secondary trauma’ for the victims/survivors.  In 2020, Justice4her invited experts from local legal and SRHR NGOs to give 3 days of training on GBV and gender-sensitive reporting to 25 Chinese journalists, editors and independent bloggers and vloggers. According to the after-survey and other three months after-survey, 94% of participants were satisfied with the training and 89% claimed an increase in awareness and skills on GBV and gender-sensitive reporting. All the participants were required to submit a piece of their content before the training and produce a piece of content after the training. Positive changes were identified through the before and after text sentiment analysis, such as the content produced by participants after the training adopting a more victims/survivors friendly tone of voice more anonymously and the increasing usage of natural, unbiased and indiscriminate vocabularies.   After the training, lessons learned and best practices from the trainings were collected in a comprehensive digital handbook for journalists and editors on how to cover GBV cases. The digital handbook, one of the first GBV guidelines developed for journalists and editors in China, was published online on Justice4Her’s platforms for free download and has been disseminated to approximately 3.000 media professionals.  

Mutual capacity development shall serve a bigger purpose- the establishment and growth of a learning organization for both ends. A learning organisation is a place ‘where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.’ 

Wrap up: media development, why do we need it?

Wrap up: media development, why do we need it? 

So far in the training, we have explored how NGO&CSO’s can work together with media organizations to pursue their goals of social justice. Now we want to focus on the role that NGO&CSO’s can have in advocating for media development. In a nutshell, media development refers to developing better conditions for media organizations to operate and striving to ensure a pluralistic media landscape where freedom of speech is ensured but also respect and visibility of marginalized communities.   

Following the logic of mutual capacity development that we mentioned before, it is important to remember that from a long-term perspective, the media and development sector have identical goals, which is to critically engage with power structures to help citizens make meaningful decisions in their lives. Having an enabling media environment is essential for global NGOs and CSOs to effectively and sustainably captivate informed citizens to make positive choices in their lives, influence public opinion and create more public support for the particular social problem you work on. 

The Centre for International Media Assistance (CIMA) defines “media development” as generally referring to efforts by organizations, people, and sometimes governments to develop the capacity and quality of the media sector within a specific country or region. Media development aims to create a media sector that is both independent and pluralistic.  

As a unique multilateral forum in the UN system that mobilises the international community to support media in developing countries, the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) of UNESCO looks at all aspects of the media environment and is structured around the five following categories:  

  • A system of regulation conducive to freedom of expression, pluralism and diversity of the media  
  • Plurality and diversity of media, a level economic playing field and transparency of ownership  
  • Media as a platform for democratic discourse  
  • Professional capacity building and supporting institutions that underpins freedom of expression, pluralism and diversity  
  • Infrastructural capacity is sufficient to support independent and pluralistic media 

From the above dimensions, global NGOs and CSOs can advocate media development from multiple perspectives, such as the freedom of expression, the right to access information, free press, safety and security and benefits of journalists, diversity of media ownership, development of independent and community-based media etc. 

Advocating for the media follows all the same tenets as any other advocacy project. You need to define your advocacy goals, analyse the context, map your stakeholders, create your key message and present the issue to power holders who can effect change. Based on your advocacy objective, you can define your advocacy target audience. 

Course key takeaways 

  • To tackle those social problems successfully and effectively, a cross-sector joint effort is needed 
  • There is a love-hate relationship between the two sectors, but they need each other more than ever 
  • The ‘future of journalism’ and the ‘future of development’ have a common goal – from critically engaging with power structures to helping citizens in making meaningful and informed decisions.