UNSIA Newsletter Issue 1, December 1997
Communication Strategy for Africa
The United Nations system-wide Special Initiative on Africa (SIA) is a set of well planned and coordinated actions to garner support for Africa’s development.
Given the Initiative’s focus on agency cooperation and coordination, an effective communications strategy is mandatory. To this end, the SIA Secretariat prepared a Communication Strategy for Africa.
The objectives of the Strategy are: highlighting the SIA activities with emphasis on interagency cooperation; increasing public awareness to the Initiative; mobilizing "friends of Africa" constituency in major donor capitals; and, disseminating what works and does not work in the area of policies and programmes in support of Africa’s development. At the heart of the strategy is redressing Africa’s image through balanced development reporting on the continent. Further, the Strategy seeks to enhance the UN’s public image in Africa throgh systematic dissemination of UN efforts in Africa’s development.
To achieve the objectives, the Strategy identifies specific stakeholders whose activities have to be made consonant with the overall objective of creating a realistic image for Africa: African government policy makers; industrial country opinion makers; civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations; friends of Africa; the donor community at large; and domestic and international media.
The Sixth ACC Steering Committee, at its April meeting in Geneva, discussed and endorsed the broad thrust of the Communication Strategy. In July 1997, an ECA SIA Secretariat Team traveled to Geneva, New York and Washington, D.C. for follow up consultations on the Strategy with SIA partner agencies.
On October 14-15 1997, the Secretariat convened a consultation meeting on Redressing the Image of Africa Problem, a key focus of the Communication Strategy. The meeting benefited from the participation of media experts from organisations such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Inter Press Service (IPS). The group analyzed the Africa image problem and recommended that ECA take a lead in strengthening the African media by holding regular workshops for African journalists on the development challenges facing Africa.
Participants were careful to mention that they were not for a mere facelift of the image, but rather wanted to see fundamental changes in the way Africa is reported domestically and internationally. Acknowledging the problem was partly a result of paucity of information, they requested ECA to develop an authoritative data base on African development issues on the Internet and supported an ECA proposal for preparing a hard copy sourcebook for use by journalists. The group also endorsed the development of the Telematics media project started by the ECA under the Harnessing Information and Technology for Development (HITD) component of SIA.
The ECA will take follow-up actions on the recommendations and will take steps to create a data base as well as a sourcebook as first steps towards making the Communication Strategy a reality.