Why Training Day Matters: An Investigative Journalism Program in Zambia
With the growing number of journalism training programs being conducted in the developing world, it would be interesting to know how these programs are designed and assessed. For instance, are they focusing on the right success factors? Are they comprehensive or strategic enough? As stated by Shanthi Kalathil in her how-to-guide on media development, “a program that plunks down a sum of money for ‘training journalists’ then measures success by the number of journalists trained is unlikely to have a substantive impact.” Instead, she recommends piecing together a series of programmatic activities shaped by strategic insight into the country’s media sector. This is precisely what the World Bank’s Governance Team in Zambia did with an investigative journalist training program in Zambia.
Close to 60 countries are planning elections this year. Close to 60 chances to change political fates, 60 occasions to uphold democracy by exercising democratic rights. The number of elections that will be truly fair and equal is likely to be lower. Election fraud or election irregularities are rampant problems, and sometimes voters complain about hurdles to free elections even in old democracies. We will learn and see a lot this year, and many new and old problems of electoral systems will come under renewed scrutiny. Election monitoring is an opportunity for development groups to have an impact – and sometimes it’s a matter of media development.
What’s media assistance about anyway? Actually, there’s not really a straightforward answer to this question. I realized that when I listened to 
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The issues of journalism and a free press come to mind these days. With a significant number of journalists attacked in, among other countries, Russia, just in the past few months, we clearly see the dependence of the media system on the political environment in a country. Journalism training is the major form of media development - how to use new technologies, how to write a good feature, how to sniff out a corruption scandal - but is anyone thinking about what happens to reporters in countries where the rule of law is weak? This year alone, 
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