A Monitoring & Evaluation Toolkit for Media Development: What do available indicators and integrative approaches have to offer? Antonio Lambino II, Alexandra Tebay and Sarah Buzby, Annenberg School for Communication , University of Pennsylvania Law School, University of Pennsylvania
MEDIA MATTERS SECTION 2: How Media Matters: Measuring its Impact
“Press freedom is understood differently in the various parts of the world... even established democracies do not interpret press freedom in exactly the same way.�
81
Christina Holtz-Bacha
As the media development sector continues to professionalize, international donor institutions have increasingly emphasized the need for Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) initiatives to gauge the sector’s effectiveness. In response, practitioners within the media assistance community have advocated the development of M&E frameworks for wide dissemination and use on the ground (Davis & Campbell, 2005). During the first Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) held in Amman, Jordan in October 2005, Dr. Gerry Power, Director, Research and Learning, BBC World Service Trust, suggested that research methods should be considered as tools to guide the implementation of media assistance projects and programs and to monitor and evaluate their efficacy. According to Power, the sector should conceptualize M&E in terms of a "toolkit" consisting of a broad array of methods from which selections can be made based on the requirements of a particular project or program. The toolkit metaphor can be extended to make an additional point: one size does not fit all. After all, in assessing the effectiveness of media development initiatives, one size does not fit all. Therefore, we propose an M&E toolkit for media development reflecting broad priorities of the sector as a whole, yet adaptable to the needs of audiences of particular M&E initiatives. This paper argues that the sector should provide an assortment of M&E options to media development professionals who will then decide, in consultation with stakeholders, which tools they will acquire. In conceptualizing this toolkit, we took stock of media development indicators that are either currently available or have previously been proposed by practitioners and scholars. Based on these indicators, we attempted to extract conceptual priorities reflecting the overarching goals of the sector. These conceptual priorities were subsequently used as categories for our proposed M&E toolkit for media development. While indicators directly pertaining to media development are relatively scarce, a number of those publicly are available in Appendix A. It is important to note that these country-level indicators do not provide empirical data with which we can directly assess the effectiveness of particular media assistance activities (which are