The events of the Arab Spring highlighted the potential of digital and traditional media to transform political structures. Government officials and citizens across the region and around the world closely watched the role of technology in the protests, while advocates of independent media felt that the events affirmed the power of information and its fundamental role in developing democratic states. Still, global policymakers rarely recognize independent media as a critical component in fostering democracy and development. Moreover, they continue to question the international development community about whether aid to developing nations has worked. With the revolutionary power of media catching the world’s attention, it is a good time to examine the evidence on media, technology, and development. Do media matter? How effective has donor support to the media been? What is the relationship of the media sector to economic development and good governance? How can stakeholders advance policy discussions on aid effectiveness to include independent media assistance?
Read a summary of the event posted on the National Democratic Institute’s blog, Democracy Works >>
Read another summary posted on the Council on Foreign Relations’
Africa in Transition blog >>
The Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy
and Internews
invite you to a panel discussion on
Can Media Development Make Aid More Effective?
Featuring:
Daniel Kaufmann
Brookings Institution
Click here to view a PowerPoint presentation >>
Mark Nelson
World Bank Institute
Tara Susman-Peña
Internews
Click here to view a PowerPoint presentation >>
With remarks by:
Mark Frohardt
Internews
Moderated by:
Sina Odugbemi
World Bank
Monday, January 30, 2012
12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
About the participants:
Daniel Kaufmann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he carries out policy analysis and applied research on international economic development, governance, regulation, and corruption. Previously, he served as a director at the World Bank Institute, where he pioneered new approaches to measure and analyze governance and corruption, helping countries formulate action programs. At the World Bank, Kaufmann also held senior positions focused on finance, regulation, and anti-corruption, as well as on capacity building for Latin America. He served as lead economist for economies in transition and earlier in his career was a senior economist in Africa. In the early 1990s, Kaufmann was the first chief of mission of the World Bank to Ukraine, and then a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Kaufmann is also a member of the Global Agenda Council at the World Economic Forum, as well as a member of advisory boards at Revenue Watch Institute, Transparency International, and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. A Chilean national, he earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in economics at Harvard, and a bachelor’s degree in economics and statistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Mark Nelson is lead specialist focusing on capacity development and aid effectiveness at the World Bank Institute (WBI). He has been involved in media development issues at the World Bank since 1996, when he helped launch a series of programs to support newly independent media in Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to working at WBI, Nelson spent more than a decade as a European diplomatic correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, based in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris. He covered the negotiations leading to the Maastricht Treaty, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the war in Bosnia. While on leave from the Wall Street Journal from 1992-1993, Nelson was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, where he co-directed a major study on U.S.-European relations and wrote extensively on the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, among other subjects, for newspapers and scholarly journals.
Tara Susman-Peña is the director of research for Internews’s Media Map Project, a study examining the impact of media development assistance worldwide, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Before joining Internews in 2010, she worked in the audience insight and research department at National Public Radio, where she managed the online listener panel and qualitative research initiatives. A cultural anthropologist, Susman-Peña’s experience in commercial market research focused on branding, product and service development, and communication strategy. Her past clients have included companies from the media, technology, health, food, fashion, and automotive industries.
Mark Frohardt is executive director for the Internews Center for Innovation and Learning, where he focuses on gathering and sharing expertise on humanitarian media to ensure that local media can communicate better with disaster-affected communities. Since joining Internews in 1999, Frohardt has provided important leadership as vice president for Africa, and health and humanitarian media, and continues his work promoting and implementing life-saving information systems in areas that are affected by natural disasters, armed conflict and social upheaval. For twenty years prior to joining Internews, Frohardt worked on humanitarian issues on the Thai-Cambodian border, Sudan, Somalia, northern Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda.
About the moderator:
Sina Odugbemi is a consultant at the World Bank’s external affairs operational communication department, and has more than 25 years of experience in journalism, law, and development. From 2006 to 2011, he headed the Communication for Governance & Accountability Program, or CommGAP, which was funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). Prior to that, he was the program manager and adviser for information and communication for development at DFID. Odugbemi earned his bachelor’s degree in English and law from the University of Ibadan and master’s degree in legal and political philosophy and doctorate in laws from the University College London.