Democratic Dialogue through Media in Sierra Leone

Flaws in design and strategy hampered the relevance of the project: lack of explicit engagement with editors/publishers and with relevant high-level institutional actors. These weaknesses were already visible in the project document: the “Situation Analysis” section appropriately identified the needs summarised above, as well as the views of civil society about the media, but did not provide an analysis of the causes of the identified weaknesses. The project document lacked an explicit stakeholder analysis that would have identified the project’s planned level of engagement with each stakeholder, the message directed at them and the engagement techniques to be used. In other words, the project document was built on the assumption that improving journalistic skills in human rights reporting, together with activities such as NGO and community training, would lead to enhanced democratic debate. But there was no explicit description of how these results would derive from the planned activities.

The project design should have included a more explicit strategy to address editors and publishers, particularly those of media outlets to which trainers were assigned. The grantee sent trainers to selected media outlets, which had made a formal expression of interest and had received a briefing about the tasks to be carried out by the trainers and the support that the media outlets were expected to give. In addition, each media organisation was asked to sign a Memorandum of Understanding setting out each side’s key responsibilities. This MoU covered a range of practical issues, but did not require media outlets to commit themselves to enhance their coverage of human rights issues, or otherwise to facilitate the fulfilment of the project’s objective.

Placing the media at the centre of a dialogue process with government, civil society and citizens was overambitious because the project was not designed to address the government and other state institutions. The project had the means and methodologies to address the media and NGOs but was relatively ill-prepared to address government officials and elected Members of the Sierra Leone Parliament.

While the project component that worked with the journalists was sustainable, a more systematic engagement with the range of key stakeholders would have further enhanced sustainability. A project strategy section with a more explicit stakeholder analysis and a clearer justification of intermediary results would have identified government officials and elected representatives as target audiences needing to be addressed with specific techniques.

The trainers hired to work with journalists were sometimes more skilled and better educated than their editors, but lacked the seniority that would have allowed them to speak with more authority to media managers and owners. This ultimately led some trainers to switch media outlets, though it did not hamper the implementation of the project as a whole because the key relationships, built and nurtured by the project, were between trainers and individual journalists, not trainers and media outlets.

In addition to individual articles, the project also contributed to creating conditions for other related stories to be published. For example the trainer assigned to one newspaper was able to prompt it to establish a weekly column on women’s issues, which continued to be published after the end of her stay with the paper.

The grantee attempted sustainability by setting up a structure named Human Rights Reporters Network. However this structure proved short-lived, mainly because its members did not have the capacity or will to maintain it. The current strategy, consisting in working with existing media-related association is more likely to be sustainable.

The project strategy was two-pronged: on the one hand it enhanced the skills of journalists in researching and producing human rights stories – the “supply side” – and on the other hand, work was done with civil society organizations, journalism students and the broader public to raise awareness about the role that media can play in the promotion and protection of human rights – the “demand side”.