Rowing against the tide: how The Media Foundation for West Africa is almost entirely funded by non-African countries, but independently shapes the role of journalism in West Africa
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Rowing against the tide: how The Media Foundation for West Africa is almost entirely funded by non-African countries, but independently shapes the role of journalism in West Africa
Media development is often the fruit of several organizations coming together to introduce liberal news norms like objectivity and balance into volatile news environments, that don’t enable political accountability or good governance.
While The Media Foundation for West Africa does the same, it decides what ‘good’ journalism is on its own terms.
Formed in 1997 by a faculty member at the University of Ghana, the organization spans 16 countries to cover the entire West African region. Each country has a national outreach office to take care of local journalists in real-time: security, support, access to political actors.
Such work is supported and fueled by the organization’s funding partners, which range from international development organizations to international governments of countries that wish to champion the cause of media development.
While the values that these financers bring to the table generally match those of the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), the relationship remains “cordial”, Abigail Larbi said.
Larbi is the Program Manager for the Media and Good Governance Program at MFWA.
“We really believe in our independence not to be controlled by where the funding is going,” she says.
Indeed, the Foundation’s projects are built by West African people, with local conditions at the forefront of their investigative journalism, a quick glance at their impact webpage will show.
But the objectives of journalism in Seth J. Bokpe’s “I Saw Skeletons in The Sahara Desert” complicate this “cordial” relationship.
Larbi says if MFWA’s objectives for a given project don’t match those of the funding partner financing it, they choose to forgo the funding.
In such an environment, where funding requires a mutual interest between regional and international organizations to build the capacity of journalists in West Africa, MFWA chooses the tough path.
She pushes back, with other Program Managers, to ensure that, “they really don’t have control, we really just have a mutual interest,” she says.
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There are several key players in media development in West Africa, including UNESCO, AICS, the Media Foundation for West Africa, and other funding partners for media development. These organizations have played significant roles in shaping the region's media landscape.
UNESCO- The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has been working since 2018 to improve access to information for young people across eight countries (Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea- Conakry, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal) in West and Central Africa. The project proposed by UNESCO, "Empowering young people in Africa through media and communication," aims to help young people make informed migration decisions. It is also the project that led to the regional conference on media and migration in West and Central Africa, mentioned by Seth J. Bokpe in his article "I Saw Skeletons in the Sahara Desert."
AICS - the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, like other funding organizations, funds media development organizations in West Africa. With enough financial support, the media organizations in West Africa can develop well and continue. Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) is the best example of a media organization there.
The MFWA is a non-governmental organization operating across West Africa, supporting media development and freedom of expression. With partner organizations in all 16 countries in the region, it has established itself as the largest and most influential organization in West Africa. A MFWA runs several programs in West Africa, among which emerges The Fourth Estate (TFE), an independent newsroom founded in 2021 that focuses anti-corruption and media freedom. Productions of the project are realized in the form of investigative and in-depth reporting, with a particular emphasis on governance, environment, health, and human rights issues. The ultimate goals of this project are to promote transparency and accountability for individuals in the region MFWA covers.
The TFE project stands out as a unique player in the region. They do not use external funding from international organizations for their journalism, and they train interns to continue in these roles, building capacity in terms of journalistic skills. All funding comes directly from the MFWA.
The TFE's role and work show that they are a regional organization that is keeping local interests and journalistic development at heart while contributing to the overall SDG 16.6 (transparency in all institutions) and 16.10 (ensuring access to information). They position themselves as a watchdog in a region dominated by state media. TFE produces writing in English to cater to nearly 700,000 readers and gives all broad investigative stories a human-interest anchor.
Bokpe believes that critical journalism can be done in Ghana and that it takes an empowered journalist. With the involvement of UNESCO, AICS, and TFE, there is hope for solid media development in West Africa to provide accurate information to the public and hold those in power accountable.
The Media Foundation for West Africa depends roughly 80% on donors for its operations. These funding partners provide support to the organization both in the form of unrestricted and conditional funds.
To learn more about a single donor, click on the respective icon below.
“I saw skeletons in the Sahara desert” was born in a context where on the one hand multiple (mainly international) actors cooperate with the MFWA to sustain independent media, while on the other, groups of interest, often tied to elites and/or the government, try to “capture” the media in order to serve their interests and propaganda (RSF, 2023).
To better understand the context, it is useful breaking it down into macro, meso, and micro levels, as Arsenault and Powers(2010) suggest.
The macro level is the societal level, the national (Ghanian) and international (West African and global) context in which the Media Foundation for West Africa operates. According to Reporters Without Borders (2023) and a report (2023) by the MFWA itself, Ghana ranks as one of Africa’s most democratic countries, with a relatively free press that is expanding thanks to the Internet. Here Schramm’s identification of a free press as a key factor for development is confirmed, as is the importance of the three roles of the media. In fact, interviews with both TFE’s editor-in-chief Manasseh Azure and MFWA’s Program Manager Abigail Larbi showed their commitment to carry on the watchdog role (by keeping politicians accountable), policy role (by involving the public in democratic action) and teacher role (by providing reliable, accurate information for the public to learn).
This is a clear example of what Powers (2018) described as “field diffusion”, that is the propagation of news norms (in this case, the roles of journalists), in the NGO sphere. Donors of the MFWA – here we are delving into the meso, or organization level – , especially those who are also active on the ground in West Africa such as UNESCO and DW Akademie, are informed by news norms that penetrated the realm of NGOs because of the journalism crisis in the West. These norms in turn filter through relationships and funding patterns to the MFWA, and then to The Fourth Estate, this time returning to journalism but in a different context and in a renewed fashion.
Ghanian and especially West African journalists are not immune from the tendency “by state (and non-state) actors to enforce crackdowns and or legitimize the repression of civic spaces whether online or offline”, as stated in a report by the Lagos-based NGO “Spaces for Change”. So news norms are reinterpreted and enriched by local actors as a form of legitimization of their work, which is understood as a “mission” that benefits the society as a whole by exposing actors that would otherwise abuse their power.
What does not align with Schramm’s view in this story is that new technologies and news norms are being adopted not in a westernized, homogeneous, top-down approach, but in a way that reflects local peculiarities and needs. Azure for example said that the radio and web radio and broadcasting are becoming more and more popular, while newspapers are read by few, and news media outlets have to plan their coverage accordingly. The fact that The Fourth Estate and the Media Foundation for West Africa play on values that recall long-established news norms but are originally declined in a local context adds complexity to Mano’s picture of a media development in Africa dominated by Western, semi-colonial ideology. In our interviews, TFE asserted that one of its core values is editorial independence, and that donors nor the MFWA can have a say in what stories to cover or how to cover them. It remains a fact, however, that the MFWA, and thus TFE, are dependent up to 90% on (mainly Western) funding.
On the micro level, Seth’s article cannot be understood outside of this complex network of relationships. It was produced thanks to them – Seth was trained thanks to DW Akademie funding, the Regional Conference on Media and Migration in West and Central Africa was organized by UNESCO which is also a funder of the MFWA, the money that allowed Seth to cover the story came from a fund by the Open Society Foundation – but its final goal of informing policymakers and citizens on the issue of migration is deeply embedded in this network as well. Seth’s work is inextricably linked to TFE’s values; a good way to represent them in a nutshell is Susman-Pena recommendation “Media development should be better integrated into mainstream development efforts, in particular anti-corruption, education, and human rights”. This is precisely what TFE and MFWA are trying to do.
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The Map of MFWA
The regional conference on media and migration emphasized the importance of a plural, inclusive, complete, and accessible media narrative on migration, which aligns with the values of organizations like UNESCO and the Government of Italy that support the project. This suggests that the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has a strong relationship with its principal funding partners and shares their values. The MFWA recognizes the importance of media in informing and shaping public opinion on migration-related issues in West and Central Africa, as evidenced by its involvement in the project. The conference also outlined clear guidelines for responsible reporting on migration that may be followed by the MFWA.
The conference had several key objectives, including promoting diverse and inclusive narratives, engaging media in the development of diverse and inclusive narratives on human mobility, advocating for the importance of the media in producing quality information content, and discussing the issues and challenges of constructing the discourse on migration in West and Central Africa. The conference brought together a diverse group of participants, including Ministers of Information or Communication, media managers, representatives of migrant organizations, civil society leaders, and experts on access to information, media, and migration.
The recommendations made by the participants provide valuable insights into how the media can better address the challenges of migration and promote diverse and inclusive narratives. These include encouraging the specialization of journalists in the field of migration and its governance, diversifying the discourse to facilitate socio-economic integration or reintegration, creating databases on migration to facilitate access to sources for journalists, encouraging journalists to network, technically and financially assisting private media to promote programs in local languages on migration, and encouraging collaboration between the media, research structures, and civil society organizations for a better understanding of the phenomenon of migration.
To conclude, the conference highlighted the important role of the media in informing public opinion and shaping discourse on migration-related issues in West and Central Africa. However, the sustainability of the approach remains a major challenge, particularly in the context of rising misinformation relayed through social networks and aggravated by the lack of resources.