Media Development 2020/1
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Ownership of mobile phones, especially smartphones, is spreading rapidly across the globe. Yet, there are still many people in emerging economies who do not own a mobile phone, or who share one with others. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2019 mobile divides were most pronounced in Venezuela, India, and the Philippines, countries where three-in-ten adults do not own a mobile phone.

WACC partner Espacio de Comunicacion Insular has urged governments of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to coordinate their responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, saying failure to do so would be catastrophic for both countries.  

It’s a familiar story. Toe the government line – any government – and survive. Criticize the government, or its cronies, or policies that benefit the few rather than the majority, and risk censure or worse. Investigative journalism examines questions of public interest: crime and corruption, certainly, but also deceit and failure. Fair and balanced coverage of issues that impact ordinary people distinguishes good journalism from bad journalism, genuine news from fake news.

Indigenous peoples are “not mere victims of climate change,” asserts researcher and conservation biologist Gleb Raygorodetsky in Why traditional knowledge holds the key to climate change, one of the articles in the latest issue of Media Development, WACC Global’s international quarterly journal. The issue explores the theme, Traditional Knowledge and Climate Change: Bridging the Gap.

With the onset of the current pandemic, things are bound to get a lot more challenging for many migrants and refugees, as well as for the societies that host them. The number of forcibly displaced people worldwide was already the highest it had been in decades even before the global coronavirus crisis. In 2016,  about 40 million people became internally displaced persons (IDPs) and 22.5 million,  refugees.  Most migrants are extremely vulnerable both to the health and socio-economic effects of COVID-19. They are constantly on the move, work in the service economy, and have limited access to public services. Women migrants are particularly affected.  We have read  stories of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants violating the government-imposed quarantine in Colombia by trying to return to Venezuela at all costs, where they hope to at least they access the country’s precarious health system and look after their families. Most had been working in Colombia’s informal economy and, after the lockdown, were unable to earn a living.