Media NGO goes where money isn’t in the budget

Michael Hedges April 21, 2009 Follow on Twitter

Desperate places share a common plight. They are always poor and always under threat. Basic information without constraint or bias is, for people trying to survive, essential. Media development NGOs are facing the task with fewer resources.

Several organizations make media development in conflict zones their vocation. Seemingly, there are fewer operating today than a decade ago. The need, though, has not diminished.

Among media development professionals there is a certain deference for Fondation Hirondelle. Established by Swiss public broadcasting journalists in 1995 to bring the utility of radio to places of desperation it has undertaken projects even the hail and hearty would have left alone. Some of its projects – facing down accused war criminal and former dictator Charles Taylor, according to legend – are exemplary.

Fondation Hirondelle’s recent (and infrequent) newsletter is focused on its approach to media development. The organization receives many requests for intervention and undertakes few. Two emerging projects are typical and in typical places – Somalia and the Palestinian Territories.

Dictators and warlords have been brutal towards independent media in Somalia. The place is the consummate failed state, ravage everywhere. On New Years Day, pro-government militias murdered Radio Shabelle editor Hassan Mayow Hassan In early February Radio HornAfrik director Said Tahliil Ahmed was assassinated. Both had been intimidated and threatened over their stations’ news coverage.

Ahmed Mohammed, founder and director of Web-based Radio Sahan, approached Fondation Hirondelle for assistance in setting up a broadcast station in Mogadishu. “In the capital, which is where we broadcast, most people can listen,” he said, quoted in the newsletter. “It’s true, some people are so poor that they don’t have a radio, but they listen in cafés and bars.”

Formidable, though, are the obstacles. The newsletter’s editor noted that violence against media workers has “reduced international support for Somali journalism to next to nothing: nobody goes to Somalia, nobody invests there. Fondation Hirondelle wishes to collaborate with all interested international players to relaunch support for local journalism in Somalia and develop rigorous, independent reporting there.”

Hope Flowers School, an educational NGO in Bethlehem, Palestine plans to set up a radio station with the help of Fondation Hirondelle.

“What I realized,” said Hope Flowers School co-director Ibrahim Issa, “ is that the media play a very negative role in the escalation of the conflict and we do not have positive media to encourage peace and peace building in the Holy Land, either Palestine or Israel. So here is arising the need to have a voice that promotes peace and dignity as a human being, regardless of religion, color or language.”

Fondation Hirondelle facilitated contacts with Palestinian Authority, aid organizations and NGOs to engage support. In addition to pioneering operational broadcasting expertise in conflict zones Fondation Hirondelle comes with highly developed diplomatic skill, necessary in the environment it has chosen.

A year ago the Israeli government shuttered the Jerusalem studio of RAM-FM, a “peace radio” initiative of South African broadcaster Issy  Kirsh, calling the station a pirate without a license. The station closed last August 7th, playing “Give Peace A Chance” as the final song.

Other NGOs play significant roles in media development in conflict zones. Internews, for example, has a large presence across many developing regions. Each NGO has distinctive missions and capacities.

Fondation Hirondelle, says its newsletter, “creates radio stations that provide news and general information for whole populations, including the most marginalized, the most deprived and those without a voice…its field of activity does not figure per se in donor budget lines.” 

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