• Media and aid campaigns
• Make poverty history

Media and aid campaigns

The paper examines how raising-awareness campaigns, formal education and media coverage can improve the general level of knowledge on development issues. It points out that development education is a double edged sword. On the one hand, media can definitely help make North-South relations more interesting to the general public , and on the other hand, the media tends to convey a biased image of the South, leading to a negative overall perception of developing countries by people from the North.

Particular issues raised by the paper include:

• apart from very few positive events, the media tend to deal with the South in crisis situations exclusively, especially when there are potential consequences on Northern countries to be of interest internationally
• shocking pictures and emotional content are considered as a guarantee of good media sales, however there seems to be a demand from the general public for more positive imagery and reporting
• traditional fundraising images of NGO campaigns used to portray people in the South as helpless victims and convey a sense that development problems can only be solved by Northern aid and charity
• yet such messages undermine efforts to create a broader understanding of the underlying causes of poverty and injustice and convey a limited picture of life in Southern countries
• information dissemination by the media is not to be confused with Development Education and if the mere dissemination of information via the mass media cannot be considered as a full Development Education strategy, it can however constitute an important aspect of a communication strategy for development education
• public media, as opposed to private ones, have also a role in Development Education since this field has become a public priority
• the Asian tsunami has shown how powerful the mass media can be in mobilising public opinion for North/South solidarity
• media also tend to favour NGO staff members for their interviews, as they work closer to the populations of developing countries than spokespersons from official development agencies and other donors
• the single most important barrier to engaging viewers with news stories about the developing world is their lack of background knowledge about the subject.

The paper also presents a number of challenges and opportunities for an effective development education strategy:

• as development education is becoming an official public priority, the media and NGOs should therefore think in terms of partnership and, consequently, learn to work together
• and effective development education strategy should be conscious of how difficult it is to digest the “development language” it uses and should avoid jargon and improve its capacity to communicate with the media
• ICTs can play an important role in Development Education by enhancing the ongoing reflection and by providing links between actors and projects
• involving more Southern actors in NGOs communication strategies and Development Education project should lead to a more balanced and realistic picture of the global South, finally giving a voice to the populations concerned and allowing development issues to be looked at from a Southern perspective.

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