DW Akademie experts and partners will participate in this year's UN World Press Freedom Day Conference in Santiago de Chile.

Here's an overview of DW Akademie's contributions to the conference program.

 

May 3, 2024

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM Breakout session

Track 2: (Dis)InfoTactics in the super election year: The scramble to rebuild trust in the media.

Panelists:

• Patricia Mayorga, Periodistas de a Pie, Mexico
• Swapneel Mehta, MIT, India
• Marcela Tobar Ríos, IDEA, Chile
• Gwen Lister, Founder of The Namibian and director of the NMT Media Foundation
• Carsten von Nahmen, DW Akademie. Germany

 

May 4, 2024

Side Events

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM

New narratives to save the planet: gender-sensitive journalism meets environmental reporting. Organized by DW Akademie and Alharaca

Panelists:

• Laura Aguirre, Alharaca, El Salvador
• Amanda Martón, Revista Anfibia, Chile
• Pamela Carmona, Autonomías Podcast, Mexico
• Edilma Prada, Agenda Propia, Colombia

Experts have long noted that women disproportionally bear the brunt of the environmental crisis. Simultaneously, there are many examples, where women have refused to accept violations and have successfully mobilized against them. Together we will take a look at the intersection of feminism and the environmental crisis – from a constructive perspective.

During an interactive discussion with experts from the fields of gender, environmental reporting, and constructive journalism, Alharaca and DW Akademie invite participants to rethink current narratives that dominate the discussion on the environmental crisis. In a participatory game format, everyone is invited to exchange ideas about the potentials and limitations of a solutions-focused journalistic approach, that puts a gender perspective at the center.

This session will be held in Spanish.

 

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

The Media Viability Manifesto: A Common Framework for Joint Action.

Panelists:

• Laura Aguirre, CEO and founder of Alharaca and SembraMedia Ambassador for El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala
• Gwen Lister, founder of The Namibian and director of the NMT Media Foundation
• Mariana Alvarado del Real, journalist, Mexico, and Media Viability Ambassador
• Gaygysyz "Guy" Geldiyev, Managing Partner at Jnomics Media, Ukraine, and Media Viability Ambassador

Moderator: Tom Law, Deputy Director of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD)  

Organized by DW Akademie and UNESCO IPDC, as representatives of the Media Viability Manifesto initiative, further consisting of International Media Support, Free Press Unlimited, BBC Media Action, Global Forum for Media Development, Sembra Media, Center for International Media Assistance, Internews, FT Strategies, Fondation Hirondelle, and IREX.

In this session, we'll discuss the Media Viability Manifesto, a joint framework on media viability for media development and media support actors. The event aims to put the MVM into practice by exploring strategic pathways and actionable steps for implementation. Different perspectives and experiences are shared and debated to identify common priorities, generate tangible solutions, and foster strategic collaboration among numerous stakeholders. As a result, participants will be provided with concrete approaches to support the survival of quality journalism in a more systematic and thus impactful way.

 

DW Akademie partner organizations at WPFD Side Events

May 4, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

• Luis Salazar from CEPRA at "Iniciativa latinoamericana 'Más poder a las personas. Menos poder de las grandes plataformas digitales'", organized by OBSERVACOM

May 4, 4:00 - 5:30 PM

• Jorge Guachamín from CORAPE at "What does journalism need to help save the Amazon?", organized by the Special Rapporteur of Freedom of Expression - Inter-american Human Rights Court and FLIP

One may call it a revolution when a single Facebook account can be a global mass medium, when 99 percent of school students own a smartphone, but only one in ten say they have ever flipped through a newspaper. UNESCO, the United Nations’ education agency, recognized the importance of this development by promoting Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as a new field of learning that aims to provide "an interrelated set of competencies that help people to maximize advantages and minimize harm in the new information, digital and communication landscapes."

How to avoid being bullied online. How to separate fake from fact. There are many lessons to learn for students, parents, teachers and older generations in particular who are struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

DW Akademie – joined by its national partners Mongolian Education Alliance (MEA), the Press Institute of Mongolia (PIM) and the Faro Foundation – started introducing MIL to Mongolian to classrooms back in 2019.

In retrospect, the encounter between a group of German MIL experts and Batjargal Batkhuyag can be seen as the starting point of this story. As MEA's executive director, Batjargal also organizes state-certified training courses for active teachers in all parts of the country – a laborious and not very profitable business.

"At the time of our first discussions with DW Akademie's experts, MEA trainers used to spend days traveling across the steppe to qualify the staff of a single school," he said, recalling his colleagues' year-long business routines. Back then, school authorities reserved the privilege to decide training priorities and school principals determined the selection of training topics.

"At that time, there was very little room for innovative thinking," added Batjargal. "My biggest concern was to cover the cost of our basic service to the schools."

New MIL Allies

DW Akademie's cooperation offered something different: collaboration for creativity; group work in video meetings instead of lecture-style teaching; comics; a variety of visuals including digital pinboards and sticky notes; training for trainers on- and offline. 

As a project manager for DW Akademie in Mongolia, Dina Sielbeck can still picture the excitement of her Mongolian partners over the new digital learning tools and MIL ideas from Germany. This was even more evident after the group decided to publicly advertise MIL as a subject for school curriculum.

"It was clear to us that we had to get the teachers on our side in order to promote MIL as a school topic," said Sielbeck. "Not to mention the young people themselves who populate social media in large numbers but don't reflect on it critically." 

"MIL4Edu" (MIL for education) was the slogan of a social media campaign that MEA and DW Akademie designed together with the Faro Foundation – a private language school and technology agency specializing in educational topics. The joint initiative succeeded in inspiring prominent journalists and social media influencers to directly address the young target group. The campaign ended up receiving 1.5 million social media impressions and reached almost twenty percent of Mongolia’s population. 

"As an organization, we had long devoted our attention to youth matters," said Faro’s founder and CEO, Byambajargal Ayushjav. "Nevertheless, I was stunned by the momentum that the MIL issue has gained in Mongolia in such a short space of time. We were obviously there at the right time with the right message."

MIL Booster during COVID

It may be seen as an ironic coincidence that Mongolia was also hit by the COVID pandemicin 2020. Schools had to close to prevent the spread of the virus. A TV studio became a substitute classroom where teachers found themselves acting in front of a camera deprived of any opportunity for interaction with their students.

The national state of emergency lasted for more than a year. The damage to the school kids’ learning progress cannot be fully assessed to this day. Yet, Sielbeck can take a lot of positives from the situation back then.

"The COVID crisis made us realize how crucial modern, interactive, digital learning concepts are for the success or failure of our schooling system – in Mongolia and in Germany," she said.

One can assume that similar considerations contributed to the Ministry of Education's decision to completely digitize in-service training for teachers at public schools. A new and centralized online platform has been operational since the end of 2023. For Batjargal, meanwhile, project achievements go way beyond numbers.

"When our German colleagues introduced us to MIL as a subject for school education, it opened a completely new way of thinking as it derived teaching content from the young people's life reality," he said. "We could go even further and say that MIL is in itself a concept for critical thinking." 

Despite all his recent successes and decades of experience as an education worker, Batjargal is somewhat alienated from the image of a revolutionary and world-changer. "We have achieved what we have achieved primarily through cooperation and a healthy sense of purpose. And because we were actually looking for new ideas and concepts for our children's education."

Dina Sielbeck seconds this. "In 2024, we expect 1,000 teachers to individually opt in for MIL training. Five years ago, I would have considered this goal "crazy" myself. But that's exactly how it is likely to turn out."

This article was first published in "The Mongol Messenger," operated by the Mongolian MONTSAME National News Agency. It has been lightly edited.

An older couple sit drained of emotion as they quietly recount the bombs, their house burning to the ground, losing everything they own, including their passports. But they still, they managed to escape escape from the occupation zone where they lived in Mariupol.  

They were among some 8,000 people eventually bussed out of the embattled city in eastern Ukraine less than a month after the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.  Their futures were uncertain, but at least they survived the deadly violence.  

What seemed an improbable and highly dangerous venture would turn into something of a miracle for these refugees – the shuttling of locals out of Mariupol to safety.

Hope for All 

"I used to have an event business before the war," Mariupol resident Askold Kvyatkovsky placidly explains into the camera as he ignores the sweat on his forehead. Cue to dreamy images of gala parties and him hosting fancy parties across two decades of relative peacetime.  

But then, "life turned upside down," Kvyatkovsky explains in a new documentary. "Celebrations, joy, events, unexpected greetings and surprises changed to constant stress and the constant expectation that something bad was about to happen."

Kvyatkovsky's extraordinary journey from emcee to heroic rescue driver is the subject of the 43-minute documentary "Hope for All," made as part of DW Akademie’s MediaFit project. Funded by the EU and Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the project's Creators Fund provides grants for Ukrainian media professionals to develop high-quality and diverse media. Veronika Khorolska, the documentary's filmmaker, is among 60 recent MediaFit grantees who worked on podcasts, multimedia reportages, films, photodocumentaries and fact checking projects.

A huge impact 

Yet Khorolska explained that, as compelling as Kvyatkovsky’s story is, she vacillated on several topics before settling on him as a single interview subject.

"I talked with him for about four hours," she recalled during a panel discussion at a recent DW Akademie conference in Bonn. "I was a little unsure, because it would be essentially just one person. But the truth is that this one person had a huge impact on so many people, including many orphans in Mariupol." 

A city under siege 

In early March 2022, electricity and other utilities had been cut in the city. Shops were plundered and residents warmed themselves in the freezing cold by building campfires in the street. Yet Kvyatkovsky, in a self-made video, walks about with the cheerful news that it's a good day because, while a bomb had dropped nearby, it hadn't exploded. 

His gallows humor soon gives way to dread and helplessness when a friend welcomes him into a bomb shelter where Kvyatkovsky sees some 300 people huddled together, covered in gray basement dust, holding plastic disposable plates, begging for food. The majority, he notices, are children.  

After asking his friend for some fuel, he returns to his car that had just been shot up by snipers. With several children from the basement in tow, he begins what will become the first of many journeys out of Mariupol. He and his passengers were laughing, he remembers, but it was nervous laughter, on the verge of hysteria. They reached villages, which he says he doesn't want to name, where locals agree to take in the refugees. 

"Bless them," he says with a smile and chuckle. "They are true heroes." 

But there is no rest for the weary. Kvyatkovsky soon hires a bus – and shortly later, two more – and the caravan is quickly back on the road, headed to Mariupol. A young boy with his grandmother, mothers with toddlers, widows, all terrified of leaving the bomb shelter – the documentary shows the various passengers piling inside the buses and waving from fogged-up windows. All in all, Kvyatkovsky will organize seven trips in and out of Mariupol. 

"You learn everything on the run," Kvyatkovsky says. "No one teaches you evacuation, rescuing. You have to immediately learn everything." 

Resilience 

As conditions become even more dangerous with more frequent bombings, and as the authorities catch onto his rescue efforts, he steps back from travelling himself. He decides to recruit more volunteers, including a surgical nurse. He takes to Instagram to chronicle the bus rescues. Followers in the United States and New Zealand offer to help in any way they can. Many assist with relaying messages when communication around Mariupol becomes impossible. Kvyatkovsky then uses this information to organize more buses.  

Later, he hears from a 12-year-old girl and her father who had lost their mother and other relatives before leaving Mariupol with one of the rescue buses. The young girl had lost several fingers before evacuating, but she tells him that she and her father made it to Germany, and an operation had salvaged her hands. In a video, she plays the flute for him. 

DW Akademie's project "MediaFit Programme for Information Integrity in southern and eastern Ukraine" (2021-2024) is funded by the EU and is also made possible with support from Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The Creators Fund is a core element of MediaFit. The goal is to support innovative and relevant media content for regional audiences in Ukraine.  

Disinformation is for the information ecosystem what pollution is for nature. It upsets the existing equilibrium, harms organisms and prevents the overall system from functioning to the benefit of everyone. Thus, it may seem that any activity that combats  disinformation has merit, because it helps to prevent it or even eradicate it.

This stance, however, sells short the  complexity of development cooperation interventions. Every intervention has consequences. Imagine treating a contaminated stream by pouring dishwashing liquid into it. Some may say this “cleans” the stream, cancelling out the pollution. But of course, the consequences for flora and fauna could be as dire as the pollution itself. In the same way, the unintended effects of possible solutions to a vague, complex problem such as disinformation need to be carefully considered.

Download the discussion paper below

A first step would be to regard disinformation as a “wicked” problem (compare Rittel/Webber 1973). Wicked problems are complex challenges influenced by a myriad of different factors. They do not have clear definitions or boundaries and are often interconnected with other complex problems.

In the case of disinformation, these connections include geopolitical conflicts, waning trust in democratic institutions, increasing polarization of societies, the dominance of big tech companies or the debate around climate change. These kinds of problems are also particularly prone to changing their shape according to the perspective of the observer. In the case of disinformation, state actors may focus on foreign influence operations, while journalists would include the activities of those state actors themselves in their approach to disinformation.

Wicked problems cannot be tackled with simple, linear solutions which stay at the surface level, only addressing the most obvious symptoms of the problem rather than its root causes. There are no one-size-fits-all methods and the problem is persistent. It cannot be eradicated permanently.

On Thursday, April 11, the world of available open-source tools for journalists will be enriched by a new app called Colmena. Behind this name is a digital newsroom that can run on almost every mobile device and allows for collaborative audio and podcast productions, even with limited internet connectivity. Users can record interviews, edit them, and share them in the cloud.

You might have found your newsroom struggling to produce stories during the COVID-19 pandemic, or perhaps you face Internet shutdowns or frequent power cuts. Luckily, these situations are exactly what Colmena was created for – or rather "co-created for."

A collaborative tool from the start

From the very beginning in early 2021, Colmena has been a collective effort from DW Akademie and three partner organizations – REDES AC, Tanda.net and Cambá – as well as input from over 30 media organizations from the Global South and Ukraine. It has been designed to help local and community media organizations to successfully produce stories, despite any technological hurdles they might face.

"To be part of this creation process was and is one of the coolest things I have experienced," saysMichelle Nogales from the feminist online magazine Muy Waso in Bolivia. "In times of a roaring global pandemic the work in this tool, together with other media partners from Guatemala, Peru and even some countries from Africa, created a sense of belonging and a common perspective."

A global approach to local journalism

Colmena is Spanish for beehive, a metaphor for busy, collaborative tinkering. With the support of software developers and tech consultants from Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Tunisia and Ukraine, the early framework turned into the first beta version in less than twelve months.

"Colmena boosted our interest in podcast productions," says Nogales. "We were part of the early testing group and, when we managed to produce 2 or 3 episodes for the first time, this felt great.  Colmena is really a good tool to do recordings and basic editing."

More than 11,000 kilometers away from Muy Waso’s homebase in Cochabamba, Ken Wekesa, a radio producer and podcaster from Kenya echoes the enthusiasm. "Colmena has revolutionized our content production and distribution and provided a safe space for the journalists of our radio station Pwani FM to collaborate online."

Reporting from any field

While the staff of the Pwani FM, a local broadcaster from Mombasa, use a variety of production tools, Wekesa has promoted the use of Colmena by their field reporters. "It has definitely improved our news gathering and participatory productions in rural areas with poor internet connection."

Up until now, Pwani FM had been somewhat limited in their implementation, as the team was beta testing the software. They will be happy to know that the full Colmena software is currently available, which is now scalable and has a new, handier user interface.

Whoever is interested in installing the digital newsroom on a server can download the well-documented source code for free from Gitlab.

Providing reliable service

In parallel, DW Akademie and its partners are also hosting Colmena as a reliable service (SaaS) for interested media outlets, meaning they will host the software on servers to allow media organizations to access it.

"We are prepared for the onboarding of new users in the next days and weeks," says Neto Licursi from the Argentinian cooperative Cambá who leads the development and maintenance of the project. The service will be available to DW Akademie members and its partners for capacity-building and media development. Yet other outlets can request accounts, as well.

"With Colmena, we have opted for an open source approach, because such tools can only be sustainable if they are conceived and maintained as an open innovation," says David Olmos, head of DW Akademie’s South America Unit. "This is why, together with the launch of the software, we also celebrate the start of the Colmena partner consortium."

Olmos went on to express his approval that all four organizations decided to formalize their collaboration by creating a consortium to maintain the source code and to provide opportunities for local and community media to access the software through the Saas.

A chance to share experiences

In the coming months, the consortium will focus its work on fostering the user community and fundraising for future development and setting up regional hubs. A shared vision of media outlets like Muy Waso and Pwani FM is to further integrate Colmena into existing and emerging publishing platforms.

Yet the consortium will not stop there. Wekesa also dreams of a shared space "to collaborate with other community radio stations globally."

For Muy Waso, they imagine "a platform that brings together productions from rural and indigenous territories with content that responds to our realities." Nogales went on to say that "there is great potential, to glue together people with accessible low-tech tools. We believe in the potential of Colmena."

If you'd like to know more about Colmena, join us for the launch at 2 pm UTC on Thursday, April 11.

Colmena was developed by DW Akademie and its partners and is supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

DW Akademie strengthens the human right to freedom of expression. Together with our partners, we play a leading role in the development of free media systems, creating access to information, setting standards for education and independent journalism.