IREX is working with journalists and editors in two Egyptian governorates to build their capacity to report on news at the local level. Many of these journalists have had little or no opportunity to build their professional skills, and their outlets operate very much in the shadow of the national media with few technical or financial resources. Few reporters have access to computers, and most newspapers are put together in Cairo and can be issued only monthly. This has limited the local media’s ability to provide citizens with the information they need to play a role in community decision making, or to supply a crucial link between local government officials and their constituents.
The Partnership Program for Democracy and Governance (PPDG), a USAID-funded initiative implemented by CARE Egypt, seeks to strengthen the connections among governorate-, district-, and village-level government structures, the citizens who live in these jurisdictions, and civil society organizations. IREX is supplying technical assistance for the project’s media development component, targeting the Beni Suef and Qena governorates. The project assists civil servants in working with media to better inform citizens of important local government services and helps media outlets establish best practices in providing objective, balanced, and fact-based information on local affairs.
The project is working mainly with junior and more senior staff at eight newspapers. Workshops look at localization of news, writing and interviewing skills, media law, and codes of ethics. An additional partnership with the Adham Center Center for Electronic Journalism in the American University in Cairo has focused on collaboration between journalists and civil society organizations.
The program also has given local journalists IT training, the first such opportunity for many of them. Ahmed El Afyouni, who works at Akhbar Qena and is a correspondent from Qena for the national weekly El Elosboa, participated in two training workshops introducing computer usage and software. “Before I used to write articles manually, fax them, and send the picture by ordinary mail. Most of the time, the articles sent by fax were unclear, or the fax was broken; that took much time and effort,” he said. Now, he can send his reports by email to Cairo. “I can see my basic skills changing right now,” he said. “It is undoubted that I will have the lead in many scopes in my career.”
