Truth Under Fire: WACC Annual Report 2025 traces action to advance communication rights
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Collage: woman interviews Indigenous man with traditional headdress, stage with banner and large cut-out letters spelling #WSIS, magenta graphic in the style of Sustainable Development Goals with 18 Communication Rights and outline of two people talking to each other, 3 people on a stage with a backdrop of the Amazon River and COP30, 2 younger women sit in front of a computer with sheets to code news articles

Truth Under Fire: WACC Annual Report 2025 traces action to advance communication rights

WACC’s Annual Report 2025 “Truth Under Fire” brings to life our collective work last year to enable people to be seen and heard at a time when too many communities are kept invisible and too many voices are silenced.

Annual Report 2025

“Communication rights are in the DNA of digital justice, gender justice, and climate justice,” says General Secretary Philip Lee in his message. “These global challenges can only be tackled when the right to information and communication underpin decision-making processes founded on human dignity and equality. That is what WACC stands for.”

Available in web-based format for the first time, the resource features work in WACC’s strategic priority areas of digital, gender, and climate justice, as well as communication rights more broadly, during a year of landmark global events:

  • Standing for “Communication for All: From Connectivity to Community” at the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+20) last July
  • Taking the gender pulse of news media worldwide during the 7th Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) in May and launching a strategic reset in December
  • Amplifying local climate voices at the UN Climate Change Conference COP30 in November and backing initiatives to stop climate disinformation
  • Rolling out a new module and Spanish and French editions of our “Just Digital” e-course during UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week in October
  • Calling for a renewed global framework to safeguard women’s communication and digital rights after 30 years of the Beijing Platform for Action in March

WACC-supported projects with partners in Nigeria, Lebanon, Ecuador, and the Philippines. Photos: JFC, ARM, PAKKIRU, CFA.

Annual Report 2025 readers can discover over 20 projects within WACC’s Communication for All Programme (CAP) supported by Bread for the World – Germany. These inspiring, real-life examples show local voices and local action for communication justice in different regions of the world.

WACC’s “You Are Not Alone” joint project with the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is featured, as are initiatives by our regional associations to advance media literacy, a safe and inclusive digital environment, and gender-sensitive media.

WACC Board of Directors, WACC regions. Photo: Gregg Brekke.

As truth continues to be under fire, WACC remains focused on building societies in which ordinary people have a public voice, Lee says.

“If the next 20 years are to deliver on the promise of just and inclusive digital societies, then the right to communication must no longer be an afterthought – it must be foundational.”

Truth Under Fire
Discover WACC's work for communication justice last year

Top image, clockwise from upper left: WACC-supported community media reporter from Ecuador conducts an interview at COP30 | GMMP 2025 media monitors in Spain | members of the COP30 media team from Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela | stage at WSIS+20 High-Level Event 2025 \ communication rights as the missing Sustainable Development Goal. Credits: Nicolle Mendoza/CORAPE, GMMP Spain, WACC, ITU/Pierre Albouy (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).