Mapping Media Assistance in Asia, the Pacific & Oceania
15. July 2025
Foreword by Owais Aslam Ali, GFMD Steering Committee Member
The Global Forum for Media Development’s (GFMD) Mapping of media assistance and journalism support programmes in Asia, Pacific and Oceania region is a timely data-based analysis of media assistance in the Asia region between 2020-2024. It will be an important resource for stakeholders — donors, international NGOs, local civil society organisations, media, and journalists — to assess donor-based funding in the region.
Built on publicly available data, in which a lack of transparency was noted, this mapping report identifies key features, distribution, and gaps in 257 programmes and grants. It provides the basis for discussions on how funding in the region can be adapted to ensure improved compliance with the OECD Development Co-operation Principles and how the media development community can be better equipped to deal with sudden setbacks and the systemic challenges it faces.
In a region where challenges to the media are numerous and diverse, the need for donor-based funding to provide transparent and sustainable programming in response to shifting ground realities is essential. In a sector where at least 80% of funding comes from international governments, reassessing the funding landscape has become crucial to grappling with a global backsliding of democratic commitment.
Main findings
- The report focuses on five countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka — highlighting the extremities and extraordinary circumstances that impact the US$308 million funding in the region. The emergency situations in Afghanistan and Myanmar, resulting in support for exile media, highlight countries with volatile and uncertain political situations in the region that pose unique challenges for donors.
- There is a geographical concentration of funding with South Asia and South East Asia collectively receiving at least 60% of all funding, with South Asia receiving the largest share.
- There appears to be a clear lack of transparency in the disbursement and implementation of donor-based media assistance programmes.
- The report’s findings indicate a glaring lack of local leadership in media assistance programmes, with only 4% of the total funded volume comprising programmes managed by organisations located in the country of implementation.
- One out of five projects analysed focused on supporting professional capacity building or thematic reporting, while nearly half of the funding was under the theme of democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.
An unpleasant push to rethink donor-based funding
The urgency for a reassessment of donor-based funding came to the fore in January 2025 with the US funding freeze, on which media assistance in the Asia region was highly dependent. Almost one-third of the funding came from the US, with most of it issued by USAID alone.
While the suspension of US funding may be the most drastic blow to the donor community, the lack of local ownership of funding programmes, limited funding for thematic reporting, and core support to local organisations point to systemic challenges that require rethinking. The dramatic disruption in US funding should be a call for fundamental changes that would have been put off otherwise.
In the GFMD Asia Members Meeting in May 2025, Waqas Naeem, the report’s eminently qualified author with many years of experience in media development, rightly noted that the report provides significant inputs to the donor community, particularly at a time when they may be re-strategising.
A call to engage locally with transparency
An International Media Support report, Where is the money?, A global perspective on forms of funding, financing and investment for public interest media, found that media in Asia sought transparency, reliability, and inclusivity in grant funding.
The reality this GFMD mapping report presents is that donors are not adequately engaging local partners. If we want to adapt funding to address the challenges faced by the donor community head-on, donors must engage with local stakeholders and develop the capacity of local organisations to implement projects while striving to increase transparency across the funding landscape, from disbursement to implementation and reporting.