Introducing BAAG to the M4D team

BAAG – British & Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group – is very excited to be part of the Media4Development programme.  Our Programme & Communications Coordinator, Jenny, joined the planning meeting in Tallinn last month and she and the team are now busy developing our activities for the year. 

Before we start blogging about these in detail, we thought a short introduction to BAAG would be useful – and hopefully interesting!

BAAG was established in 1987. It is a unique advocacy network organisation with 28 current member agencies. BAAG’s vision is to contribute to an environment where Afghans can take control of their own development and bring about a just and peaceful society. We seek to put our vision into practice by:

·    Bringing member agencies and the wider relief and development community together to advocate continued international commitment to the development of Afghanistan;

·  Sharing information and knowledge to improve policy debate and decision-making processes with a particular emphasis on ensuring that those processes reflect the views, needs and aspirations of the Afghan people;

·     To enhance the abilities of Afghan civil society in influencing national and international policies on Afghanistan.

BAAG has a long history of informing policy- and decision-makers regarding the reality of Afghanistan’s development and humanitarian needs and the challenges of delivering these. Similarly BAAG has worked with the British media to raise awareness of Afghanistan for many years, developing strong relationships with a number of high profile print and broadcast journalists.

Subsequently BAAG will participate in the Media4Development programme both to provide expert advice to project partners and to continue to raise the issue of development cooperation to the British and Irish public, media and policy makers.

In 2015 BAAG plans the following Media4Development activities:

•         Providing expert journalism input to a media training workshop delivered by VIKES in April.
•         Providing expert policy-maker input to an international round table in Latvia organised by Green Liberty in May/June
•         Hosting two round tables of British and international policy-makers and influencers on development themes, in June and November/December
•         Raising public awareness of development cooperation and the European Year of Development via events in London and Ireland and through the development of four news articles
•         Organising a journalism and photojournalism competition to award aspiring development journalists with a research trip to Afghanistan

In the past few weeks we’ve started our social media activities by writing a News article about the Media4Development programme, posting this on Twitter and Facebook and tweeting other development stories using the #EYD2015 tag.   We’re talking to our website designers to develop a dedicated web page for the programme and are looking into some public events in which we can promote EYD2015 and Afghanistan.  More to follow soon!