iMedia advises clients on communications approaches to help solve complex problems, as well as managing and evaluating media-led projects. Recent work has included developing communications strategies to combat violent extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, promoting HIV/AIDS social and behaviour change in southern Africa, and strengthening the media’s role in electoral reform in Nigeria.
In the UK, iMedia has worked with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on using a range of media to facilitate international engagement on Afghanistan’s future. iMedia advises local government on community-based communication to counter ethnic extremism. In addition, iMedia conducts workshops on media and peace-building, most recently in Belfast for the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.
iMedia clients include UK government departments, bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, and non-governmental organisations. Over the past 12 years iMedia and its directors have worked in more than 25 countries with South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as two focal regions.
Consultancy
Media Associates carry out consultancy assignments in the UK and overseas, for a range of clients including bilateral, multilateral and non-governmental organisations. iMedia delivers high quality advisory, research and analysis using multi-media platforms to engage with clients and audiences. iMedia believes that moving communications from a traditional message based approach to one defined by conversation helps address issues of trust between citizen and state.
iMedia applied these principles to community cohesion work with local government in the town of Barnsley, south Yorkshire, UK, and to researching and designing communications strategies that counter extremism and promote development in Pakistan and Afghanistan. iMedia designed the media component of the Nigeria Stability and Reconciliation Programme, DFID’s biggest peace building initiative, and continues to provide consultancy advice. iMedia also designed a German government funded initiative to encourage financial literacy through the media to stimulate small business growth in rural Mozambique. iMedia staff have designed HIV/AIDS communications projects in Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia, Madagascar, Guyana and Cambodia.
iMedia has undertaken evaluations for clients such as BBC Media Action and Internews (in Kenya, Somalia, Angola and Tanzania) of media projects that promote peace and improve governance.
iMedia responds rapidly and flexibly to client needs by fielding a wide range of skills and expertise through its contacts with media and communications professionals around the world.
Project Management
Media Associates draws on the experience of its parent company, Media Support, to manage media and communications projects. It also benefits from local organisations set up or partnered by Media Support/ iMedia which offer a source of local expertise from which projects can be managed in the countries themselves or the region. Media Support has recently handed over an HIV/AIDS communication project to a local organisation, March Zambia, after seven years work together.
Training
iMedia offers a diverse range of trainings: they include short tailor-made workshops for staff of local media organisations to introduce new skills and knowledge as well as repeated inputs over the lifetime of projects. Generally, iMedia believes that the best impact can be achieved through long term on-the-job training and mentoring to build relationships with project teams, strengthen institutional capacity and shape working practices.
Training also includes one-off sessions aimed at influencing policy and decision-makers. In early 2010 iMedia directors facilitated a workshop on media, conflict and stabilisation for visiting members of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, as part of a conference on Fragile States, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In Barnsley, iMedia trained local elected members in communications skills including crisis and rebuttal skills, as well as blogging skills. Currently, iMedia is organising a series of workshops for media in Nigeria on Conflict Sensitive Communication, and is coordinating an online post-graduate course in the subject with Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Northern Nigeria.
Gordon Adam lectures on media, conflict and health at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and at King’s College London.