KEY FINDINGS

A regional coalition can help set norms and standards for democratic media by tapping into the leverage points and frameworks of regional institutions and amplifying national-level priorities in regional and global debates.
Countries with stronger environments for independent media can support the reform agendas of restrictive countries through knowledge sharing and joint advocacy.
For a coalition to be effective, it needs clear goals and a decentralized structure that avoids imposing hierarchy or encouraging unhealthy competition over funding.

KEY FINDINGS

Private foundations and official donors are beginning to recognize their role in a global effort to preserve independent, professional journalism. Amid a series of complex threats to quality news and information, the providers of international assistance are currently deliberating new collaborative efforts.

Shall they join forces to create a new global fund­­, something to buttress the ailing news industry as The Global Fund for Tuberculosis, Malaria and Aids has done for health systems? Shall they focus their support on knowledge, research, and learning amid all of the uncertainties created by fast-evolving digital communication technologies? Or shall they instead direct their support towards assembling the networks and coalitions that can fight for the fundamental reforms needed to enable professional journalism to thrive?

This report, the last in a series that has explored entry points for strengthening international cooperation in the media sector, sheds some light on these questions. Based on 27 interviews with representatives of both private and official donor agencies, it examines the major obstacles and stumbling blocks that will have to be avoided if global support to the media sector is increased.

The institutional impediments to effective aid, the report finds, are frequently related to limited human capacity and expertise in media at the donor organizations and a misalignment of support and needs. The cross-donor collaborations currently being considered can help to address these shortcomings, though not without risks. The report offers some important points for donors to contemplate as they collaborate to support international media development.

When donors provide assistance to the media sector, they frequently back projects that aim to strengthen the media’s contribution to good governance in some way or another. This kind of funding is consistent with recent declarations made by the international community on the importance of protecting independent media for the sake of democracy and development. Yet, in the bigger picture, donors still only commit a tiny fraction to this sector and appear to be responding slowly, if at all, to the unique challenges of press freedom in the digital age.

• Media assistance represented on average just .3 percent of total official development aid (ODA) between 2010 and 2015.

• Donor flows to media are small, but are holding steady.

• China is an increasingly active player in terms of global media aid flows, although its interventions are largely focused on developing infrastructure and take the form of loans rather than development grants.

KEY FINDINGS

Funding to support independent media remains a small, but vital part of international assistance. But while the share of aid directed at this issue remains steady, there are signs that priorities within this field of international support may be shifting.

This report looks at the trends identified by CIMA in its efforts to profile the major donors in the field of media development assistance, situating the emerging priorities within a brief history of the field.

Assistance to media development, the report suggests, is beginning to acknowledge the importance of supporting media ecosystems more broadly, though perhaps not as quickly as some observers would like. The report also highlights several other important findings.

Media development is emerging as a distinct funding area, but the lack of common budget codes still makes it difficult to trace spending on this topic.
Though North-South funding continues to predominate, funds from new private donors and new governmental donors are beginning to reshape the sector.
Research on media and media development, while not entirely neglected, remains a low priority in spite of being a recognized need.

International development organizations tend to agree that more coordination is better in order to reduce activity duplication and scale successful projects. Indeed, it’s vital to be strategic about funding and approaches to common causes, particularly when it comes to media development for which funding is scarce. We’ve all seen international organizations try to improve coordination over the years in different forms—usually encouraged by donors—yet despite pouring money into pricey coordination activities, convoluted funding schemes and overlapping development approaches have persisted.

This report maps the evolution of evaluation and donor decision making in media development over the last two decades. Through interviews with media development donors, implementers and academics, we examine major donor perspectives on monitoring and evaluation (M&E), the main challenges within media development M&E, how donors define its goals and methods, and how they incorporate M&E into their funding decisions, if at all. The goal of this report is to aggregate the expertise of those experts with practical experience in all aspects of media development M&E. We find a vast majority of those interviewed believe there has been an increased emphasis on M&E, many report challenges when designing and implementing M&E, and donors do not always tie their funding decisions to M&E.

The Media Map Project was created to interrogate the 1 Estimates of current spending on media development are extremely difcult make with precision, due to poor donor documentation, and range from 0.3% of all U.S. aid (the United States isthe largest bilateral donor to media development) (Mottaz, 2010)to 0.6% of all aid (as estimated by D. Kaufmann in a presenta-tion entitled “On Media Development & Freedoms in a Governance Context: An Outsider’s Reections, with Some Empirics,” presented at OECD DAC GOVNET meeting on June 7, 2011.) evidence on the connections between media and devel-opment, as well as to make global data on the mediasector more accessible to researchers, policymakers,and practitioners.

This series of case studies addresses more specifc questions regarding the impact of donor interventionsthat support the media in developing countries. 2 Thefollowing key questions focus on the last two decades of donor support to independent media in seven countries.Who are the major actors? What are the major activi-ties? Which activities have a positive impact? Which activities fail? Why? Finally, we go beyond the reec - tive exercise of “best practices and lessons learned” to offer evidence for donors interested in improving theeffectiveness and relevance of their media support.These studies are intended for donors, policymakers,and media development practitioners alike