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Media Support Solutions is happy to announce the setting up of a new subsidiary company iMedia Associates which will be operational from the start of 2010. Together with the existing work of Media Support, this will bring additional focus on new media approaches to development challenges, conflict resolution and tackling violent extremism.

Inverness link to Pakistan’s Taliban turmoil

An Inverness based charity has partnered with Radio Pakistan to set up daily radio programmes for more than two million people displaced from their homes in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Media Support Partnership Afghanistan (MSPA) Director, Dr Mohammad Akbar, lives in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and saw at first hand the suffering of the tens of thousands of people forced from their homes in the hills to refugee camps in the sweltering plains by fighting between the Taliban and the Pakistani army. Families were forced to flee with few possessions, but many of them kept their radio sets. Yet, there were very few programmes broadcast giving vital information about food, water, sanitation and shelter on which their lives depended. And the displaced people had no effective public means of holding to account officials responsible for the relief effort.

Dr Akbar suggested that Inverness-based Media Support Partnership should do something about this, and on the 13th of July the first hour long daily programme in Pashto Bya Kade Baregi (Let’s pack our bags again) was broadcast on Radio Pakistan’s network of transmitters covering the areas where over 80% of the displaced people lived. Each programme includes six or seven phone calls from listeners on issues that are answered by relevant officials. Amongst the calls was one from a man who had found a deaf and dumb girl separated from her family. Alerted by the broadcast, she was reunited with them shortly afterwards.

Another challenge is now faced by people who are slowly returning to their homes, many of which have been looted or damaged in the course of the fighting. And there are fears that the Taliban could return to intimidate people again.

“What’s quite new about Bya Kade Baregi is that it is responding the to needs of listeners in a way that would be natural in the UK, but is quite unusual in Pakistan where people rarely question those in authority,” commented Gordon Adam, Media Support Partnership’s Managing Director. The organisation’s Chairman, Thomas Prag, is concerned the programmes only have funding for two months – and this is from Media Support’s own reserves. “We tried hard to find British aid funding for this project, but they are increasingly interested only in disbursing large sums of money,” he explained. “There is less and less scope for initiatives like this one that can make a lot of difference with very little money.”

Negotiations are continuing with the western donors in Pakistan, and the programmes are safe until mid-September. But Media Support Partnership believes that the humanitarian crisis in Pakistan is likely to continue for far longer than that, and its outcome is vital for the success of the war in neighbouring Afghanistan.