Courtesy of helmandblog.blogspot.com
BY ANNA KORDUNSKY
Bashir Ahmad Gwakh, 28, a journalist from Afghanistan, credits the training he received in 2003 at a US-funded skill-building program with starting his career. Born in the village of Khwaizi in the Goshta district, Gwakh fled Afghanistan with his family during the Soviet invasion, and later returned to attend university in Kabul under the Taliban. “I had a passion for literature and poetry, but had to major in dentistry,” he recalls, explaining that medicine offered better economic promise in the uncertain Taliban-era economy.
Gwakh never became a dentist. The fall of the Taliban coincided with his graduation, and he quickly took up freelance reporting. “I did not know anything about journalism – how to write a report, create a story, conduct an interview,” he says. “At the training, I met great friends and great teachers whom I still admire.” Gwakh was soon hired by a London-based news agency, Institute for War and Peace Reporting – the start of four years of reporting work that spanned six news organizations – and later travelled to the US as a Fulbright Scholar to study communications. Currently a broadcaster for Radio Liberty in Prague, Gwakh covers Afghanistan and Pakistan and keeps a popular blog, Afghan Corner.
Many similar initiatives to train journalists and establish media organizations in Afghanistan depend entirely on donor assistance, and cutting their funding would stunt Afghan media’s development, says Gwakh. The rapid recent growth of the media industry only accentuates the problem, but for now, no alternative to this dependency seems to be in sight.
Donor assistance has been instrumental in building the media sector, Gwakh says. In place of the barren Taliban-era media landscape, a plethora of new media outlets – over 60 radio stations, over a dozen private television networks and at least 100 newspapers – have sprung up across the country. Most of these media outlets receive generous support from international organizations including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the European Commission, and the UK Department for International Development.
The financial scope of donor assistance is vast. USAID’s contribution alone has exceeded $150 million since 2002. The agency recently extended its long-running Afghanistan Media Development and Empowerment Project (AMDEP) by additional 12 months – at a budget of $22 million. The extended program will continue financial assistance to 40 radio stations and publications, many of which had initially come into existence with AMDEP’s help during the earlier phases of the project.
The number of Afghan news outlets has exploded as a result of the flood of foreign aid, but many development experts saw that if the funds dry up, Afghanistan’s free press could disappear. Even worse, some critics warn that much of these funds are spent without a clear objective in mind. Emrys Schoemaker, a London-based media development expert and co-author of the 2010 US Institute of Peace report Afghanistan Media Assessment, is skeptical that the mere size of the new industry is proof of its success.
“The fact that there is ‘lots more media’ is not the whole story,” he argues. In assessing progress, it is necessary to not only consider whether the media outlets can sustain themselves after the withdrawal of international aid – it is also important to ask if their quantity can ultimately translate into quality. The international donor community falls short of answering either of the two questions, creating what Schoemaker and his co-authors describe in the report as an “open-ended investment” with uncertain returns.
Many other observers acknowledge that very few media outlets in Afghanistan have the capacity to sustain themselves financially without donor funding. Most of the emerging radio stations and publications are not able to obtain the needed financing through advertizing revenue, whose anemic growth falls far short of the media sector’s demand. Afghan businesses lack the resources to fill the gap.
“The lack of revenue-generated funding raises the question of how this endeavor will ever be sustainable,” affirmed Nemat Sadat, an Afghan-born journalist currently working in New York and attending graduate school at Columbia University. “Even with the developed state of the advertising industry in US, the independent media outlets are struggling to stay in business. But in Afghanistan, the question of who funds the media sector in the long run is even more pressing.”
International donor agencies recognize this challenge. They are making sure that their assistance incorporates specific training programs for Afghan media professionals in not only reporting skills but also accounting and business management. As one example, building such skills is a key objective of USAID’s Media Development and Empowerment Project, explains Michael Dwyer, Vice President of Internews, a non-profit organization contracted by USAID to carry out the program.
“We support radio stations to be sustainable through a variety of mechanisms,” says Dwyer. Training programs organized by Internews help the stations to improve the quality of their programming, introduce modern financial management practices and develop business plans for future growth. This assistance helps the stations to “make good use of the funds that they do have today.”
When it comes to more distant future, foreign donors are sometimes more ambitious. The official USAID description of the Media Development Project specifies that the amount of support for local Afghan organizations “will decrease over time … based on the sustainable revenue generation plans.”
In the immediate future, however, it is inevitable that fledging media institutions will continue to rely on foreign funds. Both the donor community and the independent observers agree that there is simply no alternative to this state of affairs. Even the skeptics do not go as far as to suggest cutting off financial assistance.
“When we first decided to spend money on media in Afghanistan, the goal was to set up much needed media infrastructure. Beyond that we were not very clear on what we were trying to achieve,” notes Emrys Shoemaker. The solution, in his view, lies not in scaling back the amount of foreign aid, but rather in redefining some of its priorities. One option is to devote greater attention to the media content that is being developed.
“A big challenge facing Afghanistan is its fractures across ethnic, linguistic and tribal lines,” Schoemaker explains, adding that the fledging media sector has so far done little to promote a unified Afghan identity. He points out that Afghan media and Afghan journalists could become key players in binding disparate national populations together – through content that will build an ‘imagined community’ and help audiences agree on a shared story. An environment where this agreement takes root will in turn be one where self-sustaining media organizations will grow.
For Afghan journalists, the benefits of further donor support far outweigh the costs. “It is necessary to continue supporting the local Afghan media and local reporters,” says Gwakh, the Radio Liberty correspondent who benefitted from US-financed training in 2003. Local press outlets, not multinational broadcasting networks, have the knowledge and the capacity to best inform the peace process, he adds. “The international reporters working in the country are doing a great job, but they often lack the knowledge of the culture and the facts under the surface.”