APSIG Newsletter

Grants to smallest island nations

$320,000 worth of grants have been made to Barbados, Cape Verde, Dominican Republic, Fiji, Jamaica, Mauritius,Niue, Papua New Guinea, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, Trinidad andTobago. The grants were awarded by a UNESCO body, the Bureau of the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) for thirteen national projects.

The projects span a range of media concerns, such as:

• establishment of community radios stations and multimedia centres
• training of media professionals
• digitization of audio-visual archives
• strengthening of freedom of expression
• development of a prison radio network
• setting-up an audiovisual training centre at a national university.

Approved regional projects include one for the training of journalists in hurricane coverage in the Caribbean. It aims at improving knowledge, quality preparedness and response to hurricanes and other weather disasters in the area. Its long-term objective is to improve the communicative capacity of media professionals and the people they serve, and to develop tools for a more effective coverage of the hurricane season.

At its annual meeting held from 27 to 29 March 2007, the IPDC examined 110 new national and regional proposals for media development projects. 74 projects coming from 59 countries were approved totalling to $1,867,000. Mark Perkins