Media Development: An Evaluation of Five Capacity-Strengthening Projects

"Those involved in media development owe it to the populations they seek to benefit to scrutinise and evaluate their own efforts carefully, ensuring that they continually challenge themselves to improve the work they do."

This BBC Media Action research report scrutinises their evaluation framework and methodology as applied to five different capacity-strengthening interventions in the interest of answering: "Are we measuring the right things? Where can we realistically expect to see change? How much should we spend on evaluation? How can we tell whether that change is sustainable?"

From the Executive Summary:
"Part one provides a brief history of BBC Media Action’s capacity-strengthening work, ...furnishing the reader with a typology of interventions ranging from low to high intensity. Part two identifies the three key principles underlying our approach: first, that audiences are at the core; second, that embedded mentors are the most effective means through which to deliver capacity strengthening; and third, that all interventions should seek to achieve impact at four levels: audience, practitioner, organisation and system."

Part three explains the evolution of BBC Media Action’s evaluation of capacity-strengthening interventions, including capturing and triangulating evidence at the four levels through the perspectives of multiple stakeholders - "a mixed-methods approach, with a set of indicators and evaluation activities arranged under each level."

"Part four explains the decision to adopt a qualitative case study approach for the research design, and describes how five cases were randomly selected for evaluation from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nepal and the Palestinian Territories. Part five details these cases, setting out the characteristics of each media partner, the aims of each intervention, the evaluation methodology applied, the main findings and the barriers to change."

"Part six offers illustrative examples of impact achieved under each of the levels, while part seven discusses the emerging implications of these findings, linking them to the broader challenges around securing the sustainability of capacity strengthening going forward."

The research concludes that the mentoring model, which acknowledges the interdependence of the four levels -audience, practitioner, organisation and system, has found broad support. Challenges to sustainable change include: "securing the political will to support independent media, creating a favourable business environment in which media outlets can achieve financial sustainability, and making sure that media development actors can work consistently with the same partners over a multi-year timeframe."

Conclusions and recommendations include that the mentoring model has merit for scaling up, "that there is great potential for audiences to contribute to sustainability by protecting the media that matters to them, that systems-level factors must be understood and should be addressed where it is possible to do so, and that more time and energy should be invested in co-developing sustainability strategies with capacity-strengthening partners."