Forging new partnerships: the Millennium Campaign looks to the media.

"The media very often covers development-related issues such as poverty and health, but in most cases they do not refer to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or to the commitment made by Governments to achieve them", says Lucille Merks of the Communications and Media Outreach Division of the United Nations Millennium Campaign.

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The limited visibility of the MDGs--eight development goals unanimously agreed upon by world leaders at the Millennium Summit in September 2000--prompted UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to launch the Millennium Campaign in October 2002. While it seeks to establish relationships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), faith-based groups, youth and local leaders to promote the MDGs, the Campaign has also begun to forge new relationships with media agencies. Under the guidance of its Director, Salil Shetty, former Chief Executive of Action Aid, the Campaign has developed partnerships with BBC World Service Trust, Inter Press Service (IPS), AllAfrica Foundation and EFE. While all four partners are dedicated to promoting the overarching aim of the MDGs to eradicate poverty, each has taken a different approach to publicizing its Goals.

The agreement with BBC World Service Trust aims to use media to lessen the impact of poverty in developing countries. Funded by BBC World Service Education and the United Nations Development Programme, the Trust launched its programme in 2003 to raise awareness of the MDGs, centred around the theme "Where will we be in 2015?" The initiative offers an interactive website to engage a global audience. Internet users will find a goal-by-goal guide to the MDGs, opinion pieces on their achievability, video clips on development and a quiz on MDG-related issues. In addition, BBC producers have travelled to countries like Chad, Mozambique, Cameroon and Viet Nam to document the challenges of living in the developing world. The Trust plans to cover several individual stories until the 2015 deadline to monitor how the MDGs have an impact on their lives.

According to its agreement with the Millennium Campaign, IPS has also identified reporting on the MDGs as one of its key priorities for the years ahead. IPS, a global news agency covering over 120 countries, reports on the developing world within the context of globalization. To cover the MDGs, it has linked its homepage to the Millennium Campaign website and has created a separate site, "Development Deadline 2015", devoted entirely to the Goals, This website has a running animation of each of the eight MDGs, offers a weekly newsletter on development issues, provides links to related articles and connects to a video clip on individuals' power to achieve the Millennium Goals. In addition, IPS also plans to cover regional issues that underpin each specific goal, publish opinion and editorial columns on the role and importance of the MDGs, and feature development stories that show the life-changing impact of development. By expanding MDG coverage in its daily and weekly journals that target European, Latin American and African leaders, IPS also publicizes issues surrounding the MDGs to regional policy and decision makers.

The AllAfrica Foundation, based in Mauritius, is another leading news agency that has signed on to work with the Millennium Campaign to raise MDG visibility. As the leading online source of news and information about Africa, it works in partnership with over 100 African media organizations. According to AllAfrica, it joined the Campaign to "humanize the statistics of poverty in Africa, to trace the scope and consequences of the challenges represented by each of the MDGs and to point to ways to achieve them". It plans to produce a multimedia series of news and feature reports to reveal the realities of each goal in a uniquely African context. In addition, AllAfrica will mentor local photographers, reporters and broadcasters attempting to develop specific local and national stories on the MDGs. It also plans to develop "country barometers or monitors" to track the performance of each country in meeting the Goals.

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The Millennium Campaign has also established a regional partnership with the Madrid-based EFE. As the largest Spanish-language news agency and the leading news provider in Latin America, EFE plans to cover MDG-related issues which, according to the agency, are already "part of daily life for millions of people living in the region and ... a concern to all, from citizens to Governments, businesses to civil society". By focusing on the opinions of government representatives, NGO leaders and private citizens in Latin America, EFE hopes to "bring life" to the MDGs. With a variety of print, radio and television subscribers, it will transmit its stories over their national and international wires, or reformat them for radio and television broadcast. It will also develop several MDG features over the coming years, to be filed on its website and transmitted back to the Millennium Campaign website.

Given the findings of a recent BBC online poll that 73 per cent of people surveyed do not know what the MDGs are, the Millennium Campaign has considerable challenges to overcome. While it is too early to predict the impact the Campaign and its media partnerships will have on pushing the MDGs into the global mainstream, the willingness of its four current media partners to use their mass appeal and unique market positions to raise MDG visibility is a positive sign. If this increased visibility leads to greater understanding, world leaders will be accountable not just to the commitments made at the Millennium Summit in 2000 but to everyone seeking an end to extreme poverty.