Time passes quickly. I joined the BBC’s international development charity nearly three years ago and already the BBC World Service Trust had clocked up almost a decade as one of the world’s most respected and trusted charities specialising in media in development.

Now we are twelve years old, and we are growing up fast.

We belong to the BBC, we grew up as part of it and all our values, editorial principles and standards are influenced by the traditions of ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But we have our own distinct mission, identity and set of objectives. We believe in the power of media to support people in the developing world by helping them take action to shape their own lives. We believe in the role of communication to inform and empower.

This month we take another important step forward as we adopt a new name and become BBC Media Action.

I am just back from visiting our team in Cambodia where we had the chance to look at where we have come from and where we are heading. We also had the opportunity to explore what the new name means for us. We all accept a name change is a major shift and not without attendant risks, but hearing colleagues talk with passion and eloquence about the difference the work is making, made us all feel very confident that the name change is right.

A Cambodian colleague, when asked “why are we needed?” summed up the ‘why’ as follows: “We provide information to the marginalised and the isolated, to raise awareness and tackle sensitive issues. We encourage and support, helping people to get moving – to participate in their own development and to act.”

And we facilitate this ‘action’ through the media: by combining development and media expertise, we are in a good place to support very many ‘media actions’, always with our audiences, the communities we are serving, at the heart of what we do.

These actions may be as simple as washing your hands for better hygiene and using bed nets to avoid malaria; or as vast and complicated as trying to strengthen the media country-wide as a tool for accountability and better governance.

The heart and soul of our organisation remain the same, but we will have a new look and feel that you’ll see introduced across the next few months.

The next significant change takes place at the end of January with the re-launch of the website.

I was first drawn to BBC Media Action through a personal encounter when I was working for Oxfam – even back then the charity showed me what ‘media action’ means. And now at this important milestone I’ve been thinking again about that time.

It was in camps for displaced people in western Sudan that I first heard Darfur Lifeline, a programme produced by the then BBC World Service Trust. It performed an extraordinarily powerful role at a time of great uncertainty, distress and confusion for a large group of displaced people.

Uprooted from their homes through conflict, often lost and traumatised by the experience, the radio programme offered displaced people a familiar and trusted voice speaking in basic Arabic offering them advice and succour.

The programme provided practical advice on where to access food, shelter and clean water, how to trace lost relatives, and how to try and stay safe. It even had programmes for children – with songs and dancing. To hear children’s voices singing and to see small children clapping and stamping their feet in that fragile setting was a powerful thing – it was moving and uplifting, offering a real sense of hope.

Back then a colleague at BBC World Service Trust said to me: “people are hungry for information” – and that is true. The encounter gave me a powerful insight to the transformative power of media.

So BBC Media Action is what we have become. Welcome to a new stage for the BBC’s international development charity, and one where partnerships are at the heart of what we do. We hope that we can continue to build and extend the partnerships we are part of to deliver media for good.

Three and a half thousand people have been meeting in Busan, South Korea to discuss the future of development assistance. The 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness is a tedious name for an important process – how best to organise the billions of dollars of development assistance designed to improve the lives of the poorest people on the planet.

Organising aid

Aid has traditionally been a disorganised process. Multiple donor organisations, often with their own pet priorities and projects, meeting multiple Ministers in recipient countries, and funding projects with little or no reference to the strategic priorities of the countries themselves has been standard practice for many years. A decade ago there was increasing recognition that this chaos did not work.

In 2004 and 2007 at earlier High Level Fora in Paris and Accra, donors and developing countries reached a deal. Donors would work with each other so that developing country Ministers could deal with a coordinated group, and this more coordinated group of donors would try to allocate their money to ‘on budget’ issues which the country itself had determined as its development priorities. Increasingly aid money took the form of budget support – direct funding of developing country government priorities. In return, developing countries would become more accountable for expenditure to their own citizens. Both developing and developed countries committed themselves to opening up their systems and publishing far more information about what money was being spent on what and with what purpose. Aid and budget transparency has increased as a result, and the Busan meeting has seen both Canada and the United States join the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

Aid has many critics but the choice of hosting this meeting in South Korea was designed as a riposte to some of them. In opening the conference, Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean President passionately paid tribute to the role aid had played in enabling his country’s transformation from a war-ravaged wreck to one of the most vibrant industrial and democratic success stories in the world – all in little more than a generation. Once dependent on foreign aid it is now an increasingly influential and confident aid donor, with an annual aid budget of $1 billion and a determination to substantially increase this in the future. 

Mixing donor soup

In Busan, this whole agenda has been tested as never before. It is facing two main challenges.

The first is that agreeing a deal is a good deal easier than implementing it. The OECD DAC, to its credit, has been good at monitoring the implementation of earlier agreements and transparent when things have and haven’t worked. There have been important successes; the number of developing countries with ‘sound’ national development strategies has tripled since 2005, and organised donor support to such strategies has improved.

Successes are, however, greatly outweighed by failures. Very limited progress has been made in enhancing the capacity of developing country citizens to subject aid spending or national development policies to real scrutiny. A progress report published by the DAC in advance of Busan argued that ‘perhaps the most important overall finding on the implementation of the principles has been the clear and almost universal failure… to advance on making direct mutual accountability more transparent, balanced and effective.’

In total, only one out of nine key benchmarks set in Accra had been met. The background to Busan was one of failed implementation.

The second challenge is more serious still.

Despite the chill winds of the global economic crisis – felt keenly in the West and even more so by those dealing with high food and energy prices – the aid donors club is growing fast. South Korea is not the only new entrant on the scene; Brazil, India China and other emerging economies are becoming powerful new donors themselves. Add to this mix the big private donors such as the Gates Foundation and the multiple global funding mechanisms, such as the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria and you get a rich soup of donors with very different agendas, cultures and ways of working.

A central tenet of the Busan meeting is that this expansion is badly needed. The Millennium Development Goals are off-track, the financial crisis is putting pressure on western development budgets, the problems of famine, food insecurity, energy and climate change make the need for development money ever greater. The main objective of Busan was to form a new ‘Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation’ which could accommodatenew donor actors.

The potentially thankless task of getting common ground among this group has been one of the main challenges facing the OECD DAC in putting together an agreement. The process has struggled. A major aim of the organisers of this meeting was to get China to join this club. The hopes appeared to have been dashed when the Chinese delegation turned up and promptly announced that they would not be signing up to the declaration. In the event, China, Brazil and India and other emerging economies did agree that the declaration from the meeting would be a “reference” for their development cooperation, but only on a voluntary basis.

There are many reasons why countries like China would not want to commit themselves more fully. It could ostensibly commit them to being far more transparent about where their money goes and for what purpose and intensify pressure to untie their aid. Besides, China like other emerging economies also see aid as south-south cooperation which historically has been politically rooted in efforts to counter Western hegemony. New models of ‘triangular cooperation’ are emerging, and a session at the conference on south-south cooperation focused on practical technical sharing of knowledge and experience between countries that had experienced similar development challenges. Nevertheless, joining what many developing countries see as a Western club of donors is a big step, particularly when so many of the rules of the club have been established before they have joined. Underpinning much of the debate at one fascinating conference session on the subject of Asian development cooperation was a deep- seated historical sense of national humiliation and a determination not to be in thrall to a weakened West regarded by many new actors as still bent on lecturing others on how to govern themselves.

All this raises a question. Is there a point when the search for consensus among an ever growing set of actors comes at the price of effectiveness? Many of the emerging economies are pursuing their own national interests in their aid policies, just as Western countries have done. The carefully calibrated language of the Busan outcome document is that of the lowest common denominator. It is short on clear, time-bound indicators and hard targets. It is focused on setting out rules that can be agreed by the widest range of actors.
The drafts and final text of the declaration coming out of Busan have been tailored to make it more palatable to new emerging economy entrants. The danger is that the broader the consensus, the shallower it becomes and that some important things get left out. Are we moving now towards a development consensus that everyone can live with, but few really buy into?

The cost of consensus

I must declare an interest in this debate. The BBC World Service Trust – a charity founded by the BBC that is legally, financially and operationally independent – is not an advocacy organisation but it does strongly believe that a free and plural media, strong investigative, financial and other forms of journalism, and open and connected societies are key to making accountability work in society. The media is also key to making the issues discussed at Busan relevant to and resonant with those who have most to win or lose from the outcome of these debates.

Our work has focused significantly on working with developing country media to enable citizens in developing countries to question their political leaders in front of millions on radio and television. In the run up to Busan over the last couple of years, we have also helped organise meetings with and worked alongside the OECD DAC to document the evidence base supporting the role of media as an accountability mechanism and to highlight its relevance of media to aid effectiveness.

The word ‘media’ does not appear in the Busan declaration despite recommendations coming from the preparatory processes and synthesis (PDF) of findings on ownership and accountability recognising its role.

There are defensible reasons for this, and too many negotiations of this kind insist on listing every group in society anyone feels are important (faith groups, youth groups, political parties and many other actors who have engaged actively in the Busan process are also not mentioned and are assumed, like media, to fall into an overall category of “’non-state actors”’). However, important emphasis is placed on parliaments and civil society organisations as key sources of accountability. The omission of any language on a free media as a source of political accountability looks odd.

The Busan process is a response to how the world is changing, particularly given the growing influence and development role of emerging economies. It has as one of its central objectives making ‘domestic’ accountability work better and to address the problem that development strategies are too disconnected from the people they are designed to benefit. Few disagree that media is important to this, so it seems strange and puzzling that it appears to be so overtly ignored.

It is more puzzling still given this meeting takes place in the winter following the Arab Spring. It is not just the reconfiguration of power moving from West to East and North to South that is happening. Growing access to new communication technologies and independent media is enabling more power to shift from governments to citizens, from institutions to networks, from elites to masses, from old to young. The Arab Spring was just the most powerful manifestation of this shift.

The Busan process places a strong and welcome emphasis on issues of aid transparency and opening up access to information on budgets and government processes and on the importance of civil society. It seems oblivious however to these wider changes in how citizens are holding their governments to account.

A central hypothesis remains behind the Busan process that it is governments that shape development and that the South Korean example of the past provides a blueprint for the future. Perhaps, but the world is changing in broader ways than the simple shifting of international economic and power balances. Information empowered people, companies and civil societies are increasingly driving change. A central focus on the role of the state makes sense, particularly when this process is so focused on fragile and conflict affected states – a strong case for this was certainly made by President Paul Kagame of Rwanda in his keynote address to the conference. However, present that case to the citizens of many of the Arab Spring countries and you may get a very different perspective.

The Busan process is an attempt to reach a consensus, a consensus where commitments to support the more tricky and political elements of development assistance – such as free media and a right to information – might appear problematic. The consequence is a declaration that seems consensual and reasonable, one bent on accommodating as many actors as possible. Look here for a technical consensus on development effectiveness and you will find it. Look for a vision of development effectiveness, particularly a vision rooted in the creativity and innovation with which citizens are taking control over their own futures and lives around the world and you will look in vain.

This criticism is not aimed at those organising this meeting and those facilitating the process in the OECD DAC I know are not the dry technocrats implied here. The technicality and limitations of the declaration are the inevitable cost of achieving an ever broader consensus.

The West has often messed up its development assistance. It has used aid to advance its own economic and political interests, lectured and hectored aid recipients and sometimes got things badly wrong. I would argue that it has also tried to learn from its mistakes and that, for all its problems, the aid effectiveness agreements of Paris and Accra were essentially progressive ones aimed at rectifying the mistakes of the past. They were designed to put developing countries in the driving seat, and to ensure that the accountability relationship was downwards to citizens, not upwards to donors.

That seems a precious achievement but it is built on a consensus that can only be stretched so far. The aid effectiveness agenda has achieved much that is important and all of that has been achieved through consensus. The absence of any language about the importance of a free media from the document may be telling us something about the cost of such a consensus. At some point this may become a price that stops being worth paying.

There were real achievements at this meeting. The benefits of consensus were clear – a fresh energy around aid transparency, a new and important agreement on aid to fragile states and the creation of a more global aid framework capable of accommodating very diverse aid actors.

The costs are less clear, but to this observer very real. We should get better at counting them.

James Deane is the Director of Policy at the BBC World Service Trust. The BBC World Service Trust is an international development charity which is supported by but operationally independent of the BBC. His views should not be taken to represent those of the BBC.

Rajkumar and Sweta were the first HIV positive couple to appear in Indian television advertisements (produced by the BBC World Service Trust) on HIV and AIDS related discrimination. That was in 2003-04.

On the eve of World AIDS Day 2011, sitting across us at the BBC WST’s office inDelhi, Rajkumar recounted how their lives changed after talking openly about being HIV positive on national television:

“At the time there was no free ART [anti retroviral therapy]. we had no money and our families couldn’t afford to help us either. ART cost 4000 rupees per person per month (approximately double monthly minimum wage).

“No one really understood the infection. In 2002 a doctor at a hospital in Delhi refused to give me injections because he was afraid he’d get infected. My father had to do it.

“We decided to do the advertisement. We thought we’d help people understand HIV and AIDS. This was our chance to earn some money as well. But after we did the ad, our landlord threw us out and our community disowned us.

“It was very difficult and we thought that we had made a big mistake. Then one of my friends, Ravi, having seen the ad and understood that he couldn’t contract the infection by touching or living with us, invited us to stay in his one bedroom flat with his family. Others soon began to come around.

“Many other HIV positive couples started coming forward to talk about their lives. They said the ad made them feel more hopeful about their lives. The ad made them feel like they were not alone and that help and support were available.

“So it was worth it. That’s what I keep thinking.” 

Sweta is now six months pregnant. She visits her doctor every month, has her ART (which is free now) everyday and looks healthy and happy. The treatment is better, access to healthcare is better, there’s less discrimination in hospitals, and her family and community have by and large accepted them, she says.

Of course, there are also many who don’t know that the two are HIV positive and they feel it is better left that way. Rajkumar is convinced he will be fired from his job if his employers find out his status.

However, they both say that things are much better than before. They believe things will only get better with time provided that efforts to address discrimination continue and that free ART continues to be available.

And perhaps that is what we (all of us who are working on Getting to Zero) need to think about. Yes, we’re so far ahead from where we were when we began but in order for us to make it to zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS related deaths perhaps we need to continue a multipronged approach to the epidemic.

Will the AIDS free Generation 2015 see the light of day if we stop endorsing safe sex, stop providing free treatment,  shut drop-in centres for intravenous drug users or stop talking about routes of transmission?

Rajkumar travels to his village in Uttar Pradesh often and helps people living with HIV get the treatment and support they need. He says working with the BBC WST on the ad and then on two more programmes – Haath se Haath Mila and Jasoos Vijay – helped him to access NGOs working to support people living with HIV.

Sweta was head of the Delhi Positive Women’s Network. Being on the shows, she says, gave her the confidence and emotional support to speak openly about being HIV positive.

But Sweta reminds us that the battle against prejudice is not won.

“When was the last time you saw a TV spot about HIV and AIDS related stigma and discrimination?” she asks.

“A long time ago”, we say.

Malika Malhotra is a Project Officer with the BBC World Service Trust in India.

The number zero is often associated with regression and its negative consequences. To be called a zero would amount to being referred to as insignificant within certain Nigerian cultures. So it was interesting to see the theme for the 2011 World AIDS Day tagged “Getting to Zero”. The theme is in line with the UNAIDS vision of achieving zero new infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths.

Nigeria has an HIV prevalence of 4.1% according to the 2010 survey of women attending antenatal clinics. So the task of getting to zero seems like a huge undertaking.

Recent ENR research in seven Nigerian states on modes of transmission predicts that the majority of the new HIV infections will not be concentrated among the groups considered most at-risk. This could be because those groups – such as female sex workers and men who have sex with men – protect themselves. Instead infections are expected to be among heterosexuals in stable relationships – until recently considered a low risk group. They use no protection because they are faithful and trust their partners.

Knowledge of HIV issues is high but attitudes, behaviour and practice still need to change for this knowledge to make any difference.

Mass media is recognised as a critical and strategic tool that can significantly scale up prevention activities. Media can also spread misinformation, undoing other interventions.

As part of a wider project, Enhancing Nigeria’s Response (ENR) to HIV and AIDS, BBC WST has been leading a media-based response to HIV by producing radio and TV programmes and supporting media and NGO partners in seven states (Akwa Ibom, Benue, Cross River, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Lagos and Ogun).

In response to the findings on Modes of Transmission (MOT), we produced special editions of the radio magazine programme Flava Plus targeting the low risk population by dealing with issues within committed relationships.

When making programmes, the big challenge for us is to creatively identify issues behind the audience’s knowledgeable facade. In addressing stigma and discrimination we use positive stories that are balanced enough not to say “don’t!” but rather offer options of what to do.

From 2012 our national activities will begin to scale down. In preparation for sustaining the work, we will be increasing state-level support to producers. The objective is that the support partner stations will continue to receive will enhance their coverage of HIV as a social issue. They will then deliver messages through creative productions that will produce the changes to move their stations, andNigeria, closer to a zero.

Esther Ijeaku is a Project Manager with the BBC World Service Trust in Abuja.

As events continue to unfold in Syria and elsewhere, an intense topic of conversation this One World Media Week has been on the implications of the powerful effects of media and social media in shaping the 2011 “Arab Spring”. At an ODI event on Monday, the discussion focused less on the specific events in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond and more on what their wider significance might be, especially for development. A key conclusion was that, for all the extraordinary scale and speed of change, events need to be considered from a long term perspective.

Despite the optimism generated by recent events, until recently much of the narrative on the future of democracy and even the role of communication in fostering democracy was becoming pessimistic. The so-called “twitter revolutions” in Iran and Moldova in 2009 did not result in major change; in Kenya, local language radio stations created through major liberalisation were implicated in fuelling violence in 2007/8; hate media seemed to be on the rise elsewhere, as did the sophistication in the use of new media by extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and Al Shabaab.

Accompanying these events, arguments made by commentators such as Evgeny Morozov, pointed to the “Net Delusion” and the degree to which governments and other authorities can and do increasingly exercise political control and surveillance through the web. Scholars such as Larry Diamond argued for good reason that the world had entered a “Democratic recession”. Towards the end of the last decade, democracy had been overthrown or gradually stifled in a number of key states including Nigeria, Russia, Thailand, Venezuela, Bangladesh and the Philippines.

Now, as suggested by the focus on Monday night, we are back to optimism about both the future of democracy and the obviously critical role of media and communication in creating the conditions for people to exercise democratic voice and power. There are plenty of people who argue that it was not laptops who marched on Tahrir Square but people and that revolutions are nothing new. Nevertheless, most who were involved have argued that events in Egypt and Tunisia were hugely facilitated because a critical mass of people had access to mobile telephony and social media, had the tools to organise and crucially had been sensitised to a different political reality by the increasingly satellite prevalence of independent media such as Al Jazeera and the BBC.

The potential of information and media is heading up the development as well as the political and diplomatic agendas. Development organisations are more and more focused on the problems of ensuring that citizens can demand accountability from governments and service providers.

It is becoming ever clearer just how profound the implications of new communication and media environments are for democratic, governance and development outcomes. The message from this meeting was that the time has come to move beyond the sudden rush of enthusiasm that events such as the Arab Spring prompt, to a more considered longer term set of frameworks and strategies that can properly integrate media and communication issues into development, diplomatic and media support efforts.

Unesco hosts World Press Freedom Day annually on 3 May to “keep press freedom at the forefront of the global agenda”. And up to December last year, organisations like the BBC WST working to support the media and freedom of expression around the world were beavering away on plans to do just that.

Under the theme ‘21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers’ we would, no doubt, have focused on decreasing freedoms in the context of increasing internet access; threats to journalists and citizen journalists in undemocratic societies; the growth and impact of the blogosphere; protection of information and Wikileaks; and the importance of social media.

As it turns out, this year we hardly need reminding at all.

Ongoing protests across the Middle East and North Africa have clearly demonstrated that a thirst for freedom of expression is not simply a Western democratic ideal, and that media and communication has a central role to play in achieving fundamental shifts in society.

Arguments over the extent of social media’s influence on these events abound. While some speak of the revolution that started with a hashtag, others dismiss the ‘myth’ of a Facebook revolution.

Annabelle Sreberny of SOAS, University of London hits both the middle ground and the nail on the head: “Clearly people have made revolution without [social media]. But in repressive regimes … Facebook provides a space where silence and fear are broken and trust can be built, where social networks can turn political, and where home and Diaspora can come together. Whatever the intentions of their developers, social media are being used to provide news and information; to plan and coordinate action; and to tell the world what is going on.”

In other words, social and new media matters, and will continue to do so. Which brings us to the most important question right now: what happens next?

Development assistance focused on democratisation is already being boosted, policy responses being formulated and programmes being developed for immediate implementation. There is no doubt that vast sums of money will be spent right across the region; now is the time to consider how best to do this.

Along with donors, private companies and non-governmental organisations working on media development and free speech are now in the process of working out how best to support both people working to bring about change and the communications technologies that have played a vital role in their efforts.

Several current initiatives that aim to address real needs are worth noting here.

In response to government internet blocking in Egypt in January, Google quickly partnered with Twitter and SayNow to develop the application ‘Speak-to-Tweet’, enabling users to tweet using only their mobile phone and without an internet connection. Google, as a sponsor of the global World Press Freedom Day event in theUS, is ramping up its work on freedom of expression and its partnerships with NGOs doing similar work.

At the governmental level, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation, Gunilla Carlsson, has been talking a lot about a new digital reality entailing new demands on old policies.

In March she took the unusual move of inviting Swedes from all walks of life to submit their ideas on how information and communications technology solutions can be used in the service of freedom. She invited the best to meet with her and promised to feed their ideas into both Swedish and EU policy. It will be interesting to see how and whether the process is able to feed into Sida’s policy response to events in the region.

For its part, the BBC WST has been working inYemen and Syria for the past two years. Although in Yemen our radio programmes were taken off air shortly after protests started, in Syria, an online training academy involving aspiring journalists and bloggers has weathered the protests so far and will hopefully continue to do so.

At this point in proceedings, it’s particularly critical that the international community take a step back and consider its options in terms of support to media in the Middle East and Maghreb. What have we learned, what has worked (and not worked) and how can we ensure significant funds for democratisation and human rights in the region are spent sensibly and impactfully.

That’s why this year, World Press Freedom Day need not be an advocacy event, but should instead be leveraged as an opportunity to galvanise and continue these discussions.

The major global event is this year happening in Washington DC, organised by Unesco, the US State Department and over 20 civil society partners. Though planning pre-dated events in the Middle East, discussion will no doubt be focused to some extent on what these events have taught us, and how to respond. High profile activists and journalists from Egypt,Yemen and Tunisia are presenting, and many of the organisations who will undertake media support in those countries will be there to listen.

In previous years, World Press Freedom Day events started with the obligatory session reminding us all of the importance of freedom of expression. This year, in the midst of a series of revolutions in which media and communications are playing a central role, we should cut straight to the chase and sensibly work out what to do about it.

Kate Noble is Senior Projects Manager, Governance, at the BBC World Service Trust.

Training and support for women working in the media, combined with support for organisation-wide change, can help address these imbalances while also empowering individual women.

Dekha Devi who worked with the BBC WST to produce radio programmes on health issues in India had to overcome personal challenges to take part in training: “Many people, including my husband, objected to me working outside the home and pointed fingers at my morals and character”, she says. However Dekha found a new confidence and standing within her community once she had settled into her new job – an experience shared with her new colleagues.

But going beyond efforts to address the underrepresentation of women in the media, much can and is being done around the world to harness the power of television and radio to empower women and promote gender equality.

The simple provision of information that women need to make informed choices can help change lives. In Nigeria, listeners to our Hausa language discussion show Mu Tattauna tell us that they have learnt more about the importance of antenatal care; women in Afghanistan say that practical information about education and income generation that they hear on our radio programmes is helping improve their lives.

Across the world listeners tell us that, armed with knowledge and empowered by hearing the stories of others, they feel more comfortable discussing sensitive subjects with their partners and families. And discussion can have powerful effects as Sefa Jemal, a seventeen year old from Ethiopia attests: “I live in a community in which female genital mutilation is widely practiced. My mother believed strongly that my two little sisters should be circumcised in order to live a socially acceptable life. We argued about this but I was unable to convince her until I made her listen to an Abugida story that I had recorded off the radio. My family were deeply touched by the story, which made them cry. I was overjoyed when my mother declared that she had decided not to have my sisters circumcised.”

Gender equality is dependent on women and girls having opportunities to have their voices heard and influence decision-making. The public hearings convened by the White Ribbon Alliance in India for instance provide a powerful mechanism for the barriers to better maternal health to be debated and addressed. Those of us working in the media must also take responsibility for providing such opportunities.

At the filming of Sahja Sawal, a televised debate programme addressing governance issues in Nepal, Shrijala Prajapati a 15-year old school-girl took the opportunity to ask senior leaders and politicans what they were planning to do to stop inequalities between boys and girls in the education system. After the show Shrijala said of the experience, “I felt like a real daughter of Nepal after asking the question.” Programmes like Sahja Sawal can lead change because “…ordinary people can’t usually meet the authorities and this makes them more accountable to the people”, she added.

The media also has a role to play in challenging stereotypes, ensuring that the full realities of men and women’s lives are reflected in programming and that content does not reinforce negative gender stereotypes.

In India, “May you be the mother of sons” is a common blessing, linked to the perceived higher status it will bring women in society. But after only a year on air, recent audience research has shown that listeners to Life Gulmohar Style – a radio drama dealing with a host of issues facing women in modern India – are less likely to think that bearing sons rather than daughters enhances a mothers’ status. Listeners were also more likely to feel that sons should be encouraged to do housework from a young age.

It seems that, even in crowded media environments, engaging and gender-aware programming can help drive a willingness to redefine the traditional roles ascribed to men and women.

These stories remind us that, while we continue to work to address gender imbalances within our industry, we must also recognise and remain committed to the broader power of the media to promote equality and support the empowerment of women and girls.

Caroline Sugg is Senior Project Manager, Gender and Health, at the BBC World Service Trust

When I used to interview football managers on a regular basis there was always a fine line between:

1) Asking the dull questions the manager wanted you to ask but boring your readers.
2) Asking the controversial questions your listeners wanted to hear, but which would get you barred from the ground by the irate coach.

In some developing and transitional countries there’s a similar problem when reporting politics and interviewing politicians – except it’s much, much worse.

Of course there’s the threat of being excluded from future press conferences and interviews, and therefore losing your job. And there’s sometimes the threat of closure, physical violence or imprisonment.

Even where a journalist feels safe, it could be that the local important politician [or ‘big man’] dominates proceedings; leaders are often important, articulate and sometimes threatening people.

It all makes interviewing authority figures very difficult.

So how can you make sure politicians don’t dominate your interview or discussion/call-in show?

Hopefully this quick guide will be useful. It’s based on experiences in East Africa but, hopefully, will be relevant elsewhere. If it isn’t, or you disagree with any of my ideas, please contribute to the conversation by leaving a comment.

A lot of ‘Western’ training material doesn’t help: take this ‘classic’ example of the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman interviewing Michael Howard.

It’s certainly entertaining, but unless you live in a country with a tradition of gladiatorial and tenacious political interviewers (who are unlikely to get beaten/locked up for their work) it isn’t necessarily helpful.

As journalists, we obviously want to hold elected officials to account rather than provide yet another shop window for politicians to tell the world why people should vote for them.

Here are a few tips:

create a ‘green room’
…all this means is a quiet place to have cup of tea before the show where you can brief your guests. The tea helps people arrive on time and relaxes them.

hold regular editorial team meetings and show reviews
…so you can share tips, look at what worked well and discuss who are the best guests to have on.

train your presenters
…for example, here at the BBC WST we have iLearn modules on advanced interviewing, interviewing academics, sensitive interviews, interviewing children and difficult interviews. Or you can practice role plays (which, personally, I hate doing but can be very effective) involving a difficult guest.

get your guests on air to put questions to leaders
…This changes the dynamic – a politician might not be as rude to one of his voters as s/he might be to a journalist.
But remember to brief your listeners when doing this and be ready to help them.

find examples of interviews that worked well
…Look out for specific learning points (e.g. sticking to the point when a politician wants to avoid it, polite interruptions, well researched follow up questions, etc). Listen to good local examples or check out the BBC’s World Have Your Say programme.

approach the greetings issue
…many politicians are happy to spend your valuable airtime. Time that should be used holding them to account can be taken up by long, detailed greetings to various voter groups. In Uganda, some stations get round this problem by agreeing on a time limit (30 secs? 1 min?) for greetings. Try discussing what is appropriate with the guest off air – maybe over a cup of tea in the ‘green room’.

match guests
…just as you wouldn’t have the prime minister on a panel up against a very junior opposition politician, watch out for your most junior presenter on his/her first shift being put up against an extremely confident politician who is known for avoiding questions.

research
… the confidence you want your presenter to have can partly come from excellent research. Anticipate what the interviewee might say, have reliable facts to hand and know your topic. Always build this in to your preparation.

Visit the brand new condomcondom.org site for more on how the BBC WST’s work in India is helping to change attitudes towards condoms, plus view the full story of the last three years on our YouTube channel here.

Recently a Nigerian artist named Jesse Jagz had an album release party. It took place in the Sheraton and nearly all my colleagues in Nigeria were fans of his – some took photos, some helped with the guests, and the two youth shows both recorded the event.

When I learned that both the youth teams (one in Hausa, the language of north Nigeria, and the other in Pidgin English) would both be recording, I immediately had two grave doubts: one, how does a hip-hop artist talking about how hot he is have anything to do with HIV and AIDS? Two, won’t the two youth production teams replicate each other’s shows?

What proceeded to happen blew my mind.

Uche, the producer for FLAVA, and Okey, the presenter, brainstormed before the event started and decided to ask people coming to the event the following question: Who is most popular, A for abstinence, B for Being Faithful, C for Condoms, or J for Jesse Jagz?

It was a genius way to start the questions and to have it integrated with the show. I saw Uche and Okey confidently approach a whole variety of attendees on the red carpet and ask them the question taking them off guard. Some answered it was J for right now, but after that night it would be A. Others answered it would always be B or C. That coupled with a few interviews from the stars on the topic of protection made for an interesting HIV pertinent show which reached out to youth.

Meanwhile, Nazir, the producer of Ya Take Ne? (What’s Up in Hausa), focused his show on HIV counselling and testing – but he had a different dilemma. Most of the people attending the event were not Hausa speakers. He approached many men and women only to have a handful actually be able to speak the language enough for him to discuss the issues. At some point, I was uncertain of how he could possibly create a programme with just these few snippets.

And then I realised that his confidence came from an important fact: he knew that Jesse Jags came from Taraba state, which meant he was from the north and spoke Hausa. In fact many of the stars attending that night spoke Hausa. Nazir was able to grab their attention and interview enough of the stars attending on the issue of HIV testing to be able to have an entertaining show.

I can’t imagine a young person in Nigeria who would not want to hear M.I., one of the country’s most popular rap artists and Jesse Jagz’s elder brother, confess how afraid he was to get tested. It gave it an extra punch to hear this in Hausa. Even back in the office people were surprised the artists spoke Hausa.

One hip-hop artist’s opening release party. Two unique HIV prevention youth radio programmes. That’s what makes the BBC World Service Trust special.