29 August 2009 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The international media development organization Internews Network has begun a study in conjunction with the World Bank Institute (WBI) to collect evidence and research on how support for local media may positively impact governance and development.

Supported by a US $660,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Internews will attempt to show non-profit organizations how local media investments can advance objectives in areas related to development. Examinations of how information environments affect the achievement of development goals, such as poverty reduction, education expansion, and health improvement, will take place in five countries, which have not yet been identified.

Data on press freedom, economic indicators, informational reach, and literacy rates will be collected and compared to data in other developed and developing nations throughout the world.

Qualitative research on media-focused development efforts will also be sought in order to determine what is working and what is not working. Journalism training programs will be looked into for their effectiveness, as will accessibility by the general public to local, national, and international news.

Mark Nelson, practice leader at the WBI, was quoted to have said, “We have lots of evidence that media and development go hand in hand. What we need to understand better is what kinds of donor support are the most effective in achieving these positive outcomes.”

Persephone Miel, senior advisor to the Internews Network, told MediaGlobal, “We’re constantly saying, ‘Do people need clean water, or can you show that providing enough information so that they themselves can learn and do something about it might be just as effective?’”

Miel said Internews aims to improve the overall media environment in countries. “This is a very broad-level attempt to look at the kind of things being done to classify interventions and analyze the existing data to see what kind of correlations might exist between different elements of the media environment.”

Internews will be “doing a lot of work on freedom of expression, factoring in hard information on the kinds of media available,” Miel explained. “We’ll factor in penetration and economic issues.”

On behalf of her organization, Miel reported, “It’s certainly clear that in many countries, the development of an economy that was able to support advertisement and commercial media played a huge role, and in other countries not at all… We will try to take a broad look at the historical, political, and economic context to come up with a narrative of what happens in the media over time, and if interventions from groups made a difference or not.”

Internews has begun to train researchers and will continue to recruit interested persons, especially graduate students, over the next few weeks. They plan to publish their research findings on the web and hope that it will serve as “practical guidance” for other organizations.

Miel continued, “A free flow of information is incredibly important to a country’s economic development. A strong journalism presence able to do a kind of watchdogging of the government is incredibly important, because if you look at things that drive economic development—courts, the ability to get a public hearing—media is one of the ways the rule of law can be supported.”

Miel said that the media should be educational, granting access to information and data to the general public. That access, she said, “can be a democratizing force,” which in turn can democratize economic opportunity.

The media also plays an important role in representing the voices of the public, said Miel. “The ideal media environment, which as yet exists nowhere in the world, allows people with no other power in society to have the ability to be heard.”

The study aims for completion within the next two years, culminating with a summary paper and publications by the WBI and Internews.

Original article on Media Global