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Slowing Transmission: Language Challenges in Community Radio Relay of COVID-19 Risk Communication in Afghanistan

Translators Without Borders (2021), 16 pp.

"In 2020 Internews launched the Rooted in Trust project to counter rumors and misinformation about COVID-19. They commissioned Translators without Borders (TWB) to map community radio stations and investigate the language and translation challenges community radio broadcasters face when relaying off ... icial COVID-19 risk communication to their audience. To better understand these challenges, TWB conducted a survey and interviews with 65 community radio broadcasters, representing a quarter of all community radio stations across Afghanistan. Based on our survey, we mapped community radio stations and the reach of each radio signal to estimate overall radio coverage across the country. Where possible, we triangulated our findings with data from Internews’ Information Ecosystem Assessment in Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat. Community radio stations remain an important source of information, especially for rural populations, less literate individuals, and in remote provinces. During public health emergencies, broadcasters can turn into health communicators and support the relay of risk communication, but they face several challenges. • Radio signals don’t cover all provinces: Based on the radio signals we were able to map, radio coverage doesn’t reach people equally across the country. Speakers of marginalized languages have especially limited access to radio broadcasts. Relative to population density, speakers of Turkmeni, Brahui, Balochi, and Uzbeki have especially limited access to radio broadcasts. • Few broadcasts are in languages other than Dari and Pashto: Dari and Pashto are the main broadcasting languages, but not everyone understands them. Broadcasts in other languages are largely limited to adverts, short audio clips, and sporadic language mixing in talk shows and call-in shows. Dedicated programs providing in-depth information in another language are rare. • Language barriers reduce the quality and timeliness of broadcasts: Community radio stations lack resources and translation capacity to broadcast in languages other than Dari or Pashto. As a result, some important information is delayed, and some is never broadcast at all. The quality and level of detail of broadcasts in other languages is also reduced. • Broadcasters face difficulties accessing available information: Most community radio stations have limited access to the internet and experience electricity failures. This makes accessing and validating available information on COVID 19 extremely difficult. Also, background information is often passed to broadcasters in English, but with limited internet access this information can’t readily be translated. • Information needs to be provided in plain language: Broadcasters don’t relay information that uses complicated language or technical and medical terms. New terms and complex new information around medical issues need to be rewritten and presented in plain language for a general audience. Yet community radio stations often can’t provide plain-language editing, so don’t relay more complex information." (Overview, page 1) more

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Connecting with Homeland: Media Consumption of Afghan Diaspora in India

Farooq Gowhar

International Journal of Communication and Media Science, volume 8, issue 2 (2021), 5 pp.

"Afghan presence in India dates back centuries. It exists in the form of goods, language, cultural and political influences, and other subtler yet significant forms. The influx of Afghan students, traders, and medical tourists in India, especially post the 2001 regime change in Afghanistan, has give ... more

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Afghanistan Media Landscape: Key Results

London: BBC Media Action (2021), 1 p.

"TV is the most popular media platform. Majority of TV viewers and radio listeners watch and listen to those media weekly. Urban, educated and younger people watch TV more than rural, less educated and older people. Men listen to radio and use internet more than women [...] A nationally representati ... more

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Hygiene and Behaviour Change Coalition Project: Reach and Engagement Survey Afghanistan

London: BBC Media Action (2021), 4 pp.

"BBC Media Action is helping to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus in Afghanistan by using a media campaign to encourage uptake of preventive behaviours. Informed by research the project’s media outputs aim to help reduce the transmission of the coronavirus by encouraging take up of the fo ... more

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Medium-Specific Threats for Journalists: Examples from Philippines, Afghanistan and Venezuela

Saumava Mitra, Marte Høiby, Mariateresa Garrido

Journalism Practice, volume 5, issue 1 (2021), pp. 80-98

"Between 2012 and 2016, UNESCO registered 530 deaths of journalists. They also published a statistic showing that television journalists were the most killed, followed by print media, radio and online journalists. Hinted in this statistics is the need to understand the relationship between the mediu ... more

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‘Picturing Afghan Women’ for Western audiences: The Afghan perspective

Saumava Mitra

Journalism, volume 21, issue 6 (2020), pp. 800-820

"As the United States engages with the Taliban in a peace process that might return them to influence within Afghanistan, concerns are rising regarding the future status of Afghan women. In this background, this article returns to the much studied subject of the portrayal of Afghan women in Western ... more

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Afghanistan

Karl-Heinz Lutz (ed.)

Paderborn; Potsdam: Schöningh;Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMSBw), 4., aktual. und veränd. Aufl. (2020), 272 pp.

"Der »Wegweiser zur Geschichte: Afghanistan« erschien erstmals 2006. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt kämpften die US-Streitkräfte und ihre Verbündeten im Rahmen der Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) bereits mehrere Jahre auch auf afghanischem Boden gegen den internationalen Terroris mus. Die Kräfte der Int ... more

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Afghanistan Media Landscape

Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar

Maastricht: European Journalism Centre (2020)

"Afghanistan media has a history of 147 years. In 1873 the first ever paper, Shamsunahar, was established. The first radio transmitter was installed in 1920. The first TV broadcast happened in Kabul in 1978. The Internet was linked and used in Afghanistan during the Taliban period after 1996, althou ... gh it was not public and was used only by Taliban leaders. According to Nai Supporting Open Media, the leading Media Advocacy NGO in Afghanistan, there are 464 operational media in the country, which has the best media law in the region and one of the tops “Access to Information” bills in the world. But, since 2001, almost 120 journalists and media workers have been killed; more than 1550 violence cases against media have been registered and, except for a few of them, no prosecution processes have been launched for the cases. In practice access to information, despite having a good law, is one of the biggest challenges regarding freedom of expression, along with security and financial sustainability. The Taliban pose a great threat to media. Out of 120 journalists and media staff that have been killed since 2001, over 55 have been killed by the Taliban. On the other side, the Government of Afghanistan is yet to start addressing the violence cases against journalists allegedly perpetrated by governmental staff, particularly security forces. The government is not as supportive as it is stated to be by law and poses pressures which are among the challenges to freedom of expression. It has been known to set barriers to a free flow of information and to find various ways to prevent broadcasting stories about its failures. Financial challenges caused almost 240 media outlets to stop their activities in the country since 2014. Tens of radio stations and almost 6 TV stations are among the media outlets that have stopped their activities mainly because of financial problems. Although there are no specific studies that analyse public trust in media, the article “Media and government in the era of democracy” published on The Daily Afghanistan magazine shows the existence of a strong public trust in the media. When people are disappointed or have their rights infringed by a governmental entity, they turn to various media to make the problem known. That explains the popularity of media programmes that review cases and court hearings." (Overview) more

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Television and the Afghan Culture Wars

Wazhmah Osman

Urbana: University of Illinois Press (2020), 288 pp.

"Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of Afghan media producers and people from all sectors of society. In this moving work, Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the r ... more

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Social Media and Disinformation in War Propaganda: How Afghan Government and the Taliban Use Twitter

Hazrat M. Bahar

Media Asia, volume 47, issue 1-2 (2020), pp. 34-46

"This study examines disinformation and propaganda in war in the age of information particularly through social media. It analyzes Twitter's posts of the Afghan government and the Taliban, from January to March 2018. For understanding disinformation, 952 tweets of both parties were crosschecked with ... more

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A Roadmap to Protect Press Freedom During the Reconciliation Process

Afghan Journalists Safety Committee (AJSC) (2020), 8 pp.

"This paper is written for the purpose of creating a roadmap to support press freedom and freedom of expression in the Afghan reconciliation process. Afghan Journalist Safety Committee (AJSC) prepared the document in collaboration with Afghan media representatives. The sole purpose of the roadmap is ... more

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Dual Journalism Education: Recommendations for the Reform of Journalism Education at State Universities in Afghanistan — in Particular for the Faculty of Journalism and Public Communication at Nangarhar University

Arnulf Kutsch, Kefa Hamidi

Leipzig: University of Leipzig, Institute for Communication and Media Studies, Research Center Development Communication – Communication for Social Change (EC4SC) (2020), 289 pp.

"A dual training programme for professional journalism, as has long been practised in various European and non-European countries, does not yet exist in Afghanistan. It aims to combine theory and simulation of practice at institutes of tertiary education through a vocational training course with an ... more

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Quality Assessment of Radio News in Afghanistan (BBC, Killid, Azadi, & Afghanistan)

Farid Ahamd Monib, Jamaluddin Qanet

Advances in Journalism and Communication, volume 8 (2020), pp. 97-116

"This study identifies and evaluates the quality assessment of radio news in the country. To conduct this research, the researcher first posed the questions and objectives of the research and then, according to the nature of the work, used exploratory and applied research. The researcher consulted w ... more

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Reforming Journalism Education on a Tertiary Level in Afghanistan: Recommendations for a Dual Education Model

Kefa Hamidi, Alessandra Brüchner

Global Media Journal - German Edition, volume 10, issue 2 (2020), 20 pp.

"The importance of journalism’s role in society is beyond debate. Particularly in so-called fragile states, the social responsibility of media and journalism cannot be denied. Journalism education must account for the high level of skills required by journalists, and the ‘mediation’ function o ... more

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"When the Battle's Lost and Won:" Narratives of Peace in the Afghan Film 'A War'

Axel Heck

Peace & Change, volume 45, issue 1 (2020), pp. 101-125

"This article examines the ways in which cinematic film underscores the latency of structural violence in its visualization of peace, specifically through the juxtaposition of the life world of the two main protagonists in the Danish film A War (2016): Captain Claus Pedersen who serves as a Danish s ... more

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Meta-Review of Evaluations of Development Assistance to Afghanistan, 2008 – 2018

Christoph Zürcher

Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) (2020), 39 pp.

"Overall, one finding stands out: the international community has repeatedly overestimated its own capacity and the capacity of its Afghan partners to bring about rapid social change. What has worked best are modest, locally embedded projects with immediate, tangible benefits. What has rarely worked ... are complex projects aimed at building capacity and changing behaviour. More specifically, interventions in basic health and education, and in improving basic livelihoods, led to results. Interventions in building capacity for the administration, or in sectors such as the rule of law or gender, rarely worked. In reading these 148 reports, one also realizes that the international aid community is often not good at learning. Monitoring and evaluation systems are weak, and have hardly improved since 2002. Back in the early 2000s, many donors pointed out that, in order to achieve meaningful and sustainable development, more time was necessary. Fifteen years later, few sustainable results have been achieved, but many donors continue to suggest that better results will still require more time. Few donors appear to have changed their fundamental strategic approach, despite the fact that their own evaluations strongly suggest that many aid programs are neither e cient nor e ective in the Afghan context. In all fairness, the Afghan context is an incredibly challenging one, as these 148 reports vividly remind us on almost every page. The situation on the ground was and still is characterized by a lack of basic security; Afghan partners in government and in civil society lack basic capacities; many entrenched political actors have little interest in real reforms. Despite these challenging conditions, there was since the early days of the international engagement in Afghanistan tremendous political pressure on development actors to rush in and to provide quick results. An additional layer of complexity was added by the fact that the international engagement was from the beginning both a civilian and a military intervention, and planners in headquarters as well as practitioners on the ground had to learn how to cope with the task of civil-military cooperation. Under such circumstances, designing e ective aid programs is a herculean task." (Introduction, page 8) more

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Security challenges for journalists and the mass media in advancing free speech in war torn countries: The case of Afghanistan

Mohammad Tamim Sediqi, Farid Sufian Shuaib

Journal of Islamic Law, volume 16, issue 1 (2020), pp. 59-77

"The challenges faced by journalists and mass media in war torn countries are serious. The same could be said to be the case in Afghanistan. Though freedom of speech and of the mass media are among the on-going struggles of the Afghan people after the fall of the Taliban regime, it is worrying that ... more

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Psychological distress in Afghan journalists: A descriptive study

Jonas Osmann, Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar, Anthony Feinstein

Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, volume 2, issue 3 (2020), pp. 115-123

"Afghanistan is one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists. There are, however, no data on the mental health of Afghan journalists covering conflict in their country. The study aims to determine the degree to which Afghan journalists are exposed to traumatic events, their perceptions ... more

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Let Free Media Thrive: Stories of Impact of the Multi-Donor Programme on Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists

Paris: UNESCO (2020), 19 pp.

"2019 has seen major achievements resulting from needs-based, and specifically-tailored support through the Multi-Donor Programme on Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists (MDP). Actions building on ongoing work and others opening new avenues, have initiated substantial changes in favour of ... more

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Making Civic Space Resilient

Cordaid;Hivos (2020), 31 pp.

"The 10 countries included in this paper all show specific characteristics and contexts but also show similar barriers. Identifying shared characteristics will facilitate the development of shared approaches to deal with shrinking space. Don’t work in silos! It’s (also) about upholding the law: ... more