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Prime Time for Media Development: GFMD Plans for 2011

The work of the GFMD in 2011 will focus on getting ready for our 3rd World Conference scheduled to take place in early 2012. We will, again, bring together several hundred media development practitioners, donors, policy makers etc from around the world. The World Conference is the place where all groups involved in media development meet and agree strategies for cooperation. And it is the event where all the different strands of discussion about media development come together. We have had two offers to host the event. A decision on the time and place of the next World Conference will be made in the coming months and members will be informed immediately.

The 3rd World Conference will provide the focus to bring the different sector-wide initiatives together and to help develop strategies for media development support in times of tighter public budgets and less private support. In the next month we will undertake a survey among GFMD members highlighting their main concerns to be addressed at the 3rd World Conference.

The GFMD continues to be involved in some key sector-wide initiatives.  At the end of January, members will be asked to comment on new guidelines for media companies to report on their business strategies and activities. These guidelines were developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and its group of experts including the GFMD. The guidelines pay special attention to the role of media in building democratic societies, social corporate responsibility and the environment. Members will be able to shape these guidelines through the consultation organised by the GFMD.

Thanks to interventions by the GFMD and its members, the OECD-DAC process has been paying more attention to media.  The GFMD is helping to devise ways to include media development in the OECD’s tools for measuring economic performance.  The GFMD will participate in the next meeting of the OECD workings groups on good governance and domestic accountability in February 2011.

The GFMD is also involved in the large Mapping Media Assessment project run by Internews, the Brookings Institute and the World Bank Institute, which aims to create comprehensive tools to measure the impact of media development programmes. The GFMD will consult its members on current proposals developed by the project.

The next GFMD Insider will be published at the beginning of March and will include interviews with Stephen King of Omidyar, Kabral Blay-Amihere of the Ghana National Media Commission, an article on the Challenge of running media development projects in Iraq by the UNESCO Iraq Office as well as tips and advice on media development trends. If you have missed the last issue published in December, please contact the GFMD secretariat at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)