Development agencies

National development and cooperation agencies (hereafter “DevCo agencies”) are often the frontline in international media-development support. They manage bilateral programmes, partner with civil society, and hold grant portfolios that can sustain independent journalism in fragile or transitional media environments.

⚖️ Opportunities and Challenges

Opportunities:

• DevCo agencies can integrate media-support as part of broader governance, transparency or civic-space investments, thereby amplifying impact and avoiding siloed funding.

• They have flexibility to pilot innovative business models for journalism, support capacity-building (editorial, digital, business), and link media support into economic development (jobs, SMEs, ecosystems).

• Donor peer-networks and platforms (e.g., OECD DAC, GFMD) enable learning and co-financing, which help scale interventions efficiently.

Challenges:

• Often, the mandate of the DevCo agency does not explicitly include journalism or media-ecosystem work, leading to low awareness or zero dedicated staff.

• Short funding cycles, small budgets, and rigid log-frame requirements undermine longer-term systemic change. As one interviewee put it:

“We keep designing three-year projects; but media actors say they need institutional support over a decade.”

• Coordination with foreign-policy and security actors remains weak, so opportunities to link media-support with regional strategy (neighbourhood, conflict, hybrid-threats) are missed.

🧩 Strategic Recommendations

• Define media and information integrity as a core thematic line within the agency’s mandate: allocate dedicated budget lines, designate focal points, and integrate monitoring against media-ecosystem indicators (plurality, safety of journalists, market viability).

• Adopt a whole-system lens: beyond individual outlets, engage with business models, regulatory frameworks, digital literacy, platform regulation and supporting journalism networks in partner countries (Principle 3).

• Strengthen local leadership and ownership (Principle 4): partner with local media federations, journalism academies and networks rather than resorting to parallel external projects; this enhances sustainability and legitimacy.

• Coordinate internally and externally (Principle 5): set up institutional mechanisms (e.g., annual coordination meetings between media-support and democracy/governance teams), and engage with other Member States and EU Delegations to reduce duplication and leverage co-funding.

• Invest in knowledge, research and learning (Principle 6): commission longitudinal evaluations of media-support interventions, share lessons in OECD/DAC fora, and pilot adaptive funding models in high-risk contexts (for example, with embedded resilience to digital and disinformation shocks).

• Apply a “do no harm” filter (Principle 1): prior to engagements, undertake risk assessments for media actors (e.g., harassment, reprisals, unintended state capture) to avoid amplifying existing vulnerabilities.