By Caroline Nursey
Time passes quickly. I joined the BBC’s international development charity nearly three years ago and already the BBC World Service Trust had clocked up almost a decade as one of the world’s most respected and trusted charities specialising in media in development.
Now we are twelve years old, and we are growing up fast.
We belong to the BBC, we grew up as part of it and all our values, editorial principles and standards are influenced by the traditions of ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But we have our own distinct mission, identity and set of objectives. We believe in the power of media to support people in the developing world by helping them take action to shape their own lives. We believe in the role of communication to inform and empower.
This month we take another important step forward as we adopt a new name and become BBC Media Action.
I am just back from visiting our team in Cambodia where we had the chance to look at where we have come from and where we are heading. We also had the opportunity to explore what the new name means for us. We all accept a name change is a major shift and not without attendant risks, but hearing colleagues talk with passion and eloquence about the difference the work is making, made us all feel very confident that the name change is right.
A Cambodian colleague, when asked “why are we needed?” summed up the ‘why’ as follows: “We provide information to the marginalised and the isolated, to raise awareness and tackle sensitive issues. We encourage and support, helping people to get moving – to participate in their own development and to act.”
And we facilitate this ‘action’ through the media: by combining development and media expertise, we are in a good place to support very many ‘media actions’, always with our audiences, the communities we are serving, at the heart of what we do.
These actions may be as simple as washing your hands for better hygiene and using bed nets to avoid malaria; or as vast and complicated as trying to strengthen the media country-wide as a tool for accountability and better governance.
The heart and soul of our organisation remain the same, but we will have a new look and feel that you’ll see introduced across the next few months.
The next significant change takes place at the end of January with the re-launch of the website.
I was first drawn to BBC Media Action through a personal encounter when I was working for Oxfam – even back then the charity showed me what ‘media action’ means. And now at this important milestone I’ve been thinking again about that time.
It was in camps for displaced people in western Sudan that I first heard Darfur Lifeline, a programme produced by the then BBC World Service Trust. It performed an extraordinarily powerful role at a time of great uncertainty, distress and confusion for a large group of displaced people.
Uprooted from their homes through conflict, often lost and traumatised by the experience, the radio programme offered displaced people a familiar and trusted voice speaking in basic Arabic offering them advice and succour.
The programme provided practical advice on where to access food, shelter and clean water, how to trace lost relatives, and how to try and stay safe. It even had programmes for children – with songs and dancing. To hear children’s voices singing and to see small children clapping and stamping their feet in that fragile setting was a powerful thing – it was moving and uplifting, offering a real sense of hope.
Back then a colleague at BBC World Service Trust said to me: “people are hungry for information” – and that is true. The encounter gave me a powerful insight to the transformative power of media.
So BBC Media Action is what we have become. Welcome to a new stage for the BBC’s international development charity, and one where partnerships are at the heart of what we do. We hope that we can continue to build and extend the partnerships we are part of to deliver media for good.
