IMAGE: WBI's Media Program

The World Bank Institute’s (WBI) media program is forging coalitions of media practitioners around priority areas identified by the journalists themselves, including public financial management (PFM) and procurement. 

The media program works with partners and media practitioners to leverage independent media to participate in key public functions through demand-driven and responsive media coverage of budget formulation, implementation, as well as monitoring, oversight, and performance management. The program is facilitating both South-South and North-South knowledge exchanges by serving as a space for experts and practitioners to share investigative journalism practices and strategies to overcome obstacles to effective reporting on priority development topics. 

The media program connects media practitioners with expertise from local and global centers of excellence, to work on challenges facing media sectors around Africa and the Middle East. These global players collaborate with the program’s network of participants on strategies to shape the role of media development. The program has accordingly developed an innovative, peer-reviewed five-pronged capacity development model to build the capacity of journalists, which focuses on institutional partnerships; media commitment; an internet hub; an incentives system designed to keep participants involved in the program through its sustained twelve-month duration; and continuous monitoring and evaluation of participants to keep the content and delivery relevant and useful.

The media program is responding to demand for capacity development of both African and Middle-Eastern journalists. For example, at the request of five West African Country Offices (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda), the program inaugurated demand-driven and collaborative approaches to develop a regional course (with e-learning and in-person components) on PFM and procurement for media practitioners, which follows an entire budget cycle from planning to implementation. There is  continuing work with regional centers of excellence (including the African Media Initiative and Highway Africa) to integrate a core group of budget-savvy journalists into their existing regional networks, and facilitate their continued connectivity, to share their new technical knowledge, story concepts, authoritative sources, and more. 

Additionally, the media program has developed and launched a ‘just in time’ journalism training course on PFM and economic journalism for a core group of North and South Sudanese journalists at the request of the World Bank’s Sudan office. The media program is also collaborating with WBI’s Fragile States practice to integrate media development and journalist capacity building strategies into the draft Guinea PRS, to be followed by a capacity development program for journalists on PFM and development journalism.