Africa Media Initiative (AMI)

The AMI's objective is to develop vibrant, sustainable independent media that produce and distribute high-quality African content, as well as to help encourage critical and pluralistic voices on the continent. The programme has three main strategies:

• Improved operating environment for media by applying African Union and continental policies and declarations: AMI will address five sub-issues: activities that explicitly link media freedom to freedom of expression as enshrined in the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression adopted by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR); the protection of journalists in conflict areas; advocacy to improve working conditions of journalists; the technological basis of media freedom and its potential to catalyse greater citizen access to media; and the rule of law and efficacy of the judicial systems across Africa.
• Improved media quality through better professional and ethical standards: As a feature of capacity-building, improving professional standards entails designing training and education programmes that work across a variety of media platforms and genres. In this regard, the programme will concentrate on professional standards, the state of training, and the state of media industry-training relationships.
• Catalysing new investment in independent media and improving public broadcasting standards: This programme aims to: improve the regulatory regime governing media investment, unlock the flow of financial equity, enhance the availability of research data, and improve the general economic condition of African journalists.

AMI will work to prioritise the creation of political environments conducive to media freedom. It seeks to do this by rolling out activities linking societal policy and legislative reforms with institutional media practices. Key activities will include the following:

• scaling up support for the monitoring of media freedom violations and for the protection of journalists, especially in conflict-ridden countries;
• supporting a broad-based campaign for national, regional, and pan-African implementation of the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa, especially by collaborating with the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Information Access;
• testing the jurisprudential efficacy of national and pan-African human rights protection instruments in favour of journalists;
• setting up and/or strengthening media legal defence funds which could assist in establishing legal precedents for ongoing and future activism;
• supporting the establishment and strengthening of independent media councils;
• financing the strategic adoption by media houses of internal information and communication technology (ICT) policies in order to enhance both citizen access to information and the competitive advantage of media institutions; and
• supporting the design and construction of a central media policy database that can track the rapidly changing new media technological landscape and its implications for media institutions.

The AMI has also developed a website which offers up-to-date information on the initiative's activities.

Media Development, Governance

This programme has been designed to benefit different groups, drawn from different geopolitical contexts in Africa. While it is expected that such a programme cannot be intended for all of Africa, its beneficiaries will constitute a diverse sample of the African context. This programme has been designed for beneficiaries in all four geo-political regions of Africa: Southern Africa; Eastern Africa, including the Great Lakes region; North Africa; and West Africa. Special care will be taken to ensure a linguistic balancing of interventions.

AMI is the result of two major consultative processes involving key stakeholders in the African media sector - Africa Media Development Initiative (AMDI) and Strengthening African Media (STREAM). STREAM, which was facilitated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), ran a workshop with selected media and communications experts in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March 2006. The objective of the workshop was to arrive at a shared understanding of the state of the media sector in Africa and discuss a collaborative way forward. AMDI was involved in the production of a large body of research, carried out by the BBC World Service Trust in partnership with two African universities, which looked at the state of the media in 17 sub-Saharan African countries. The report includes information on the increasing diversity of media in Africa, the challenges facing media and journalists in developing media landscapes, and the frequent lack of professional standards, equipment, and financial resources. The combination of STREAM's workshop and AMDI's findings helped establish priorities that continue to shape the AMI's work.