How much money is spent on communications in International Development?
May 21, 2010 12:58 AM
Can you help to quantify the annual global spend on international development communications as part of a campaign to get NGOs, IGOs and Governments to adopt Creative Commons licenses in international development communications work?
I'm specifically looking to quantify the proportion of overall communications spend that takes place in developing countries themselves - this is the section we're really targetting as part of our campaign. Education is a key component of development work - prevention is always better than cure, and making this communications work more widely available in a 'free to air' database under Creative Commons licenses would certainly save lives. It would be great if you could help quantify just how many.
Having done a little thinking about this, I reckon there are two possible approaches – one is to start from the top and work down – looking first at the global aid budgets, then the average communication spend as a percentage, and then the percentage of that spent in the developing world.
Alternatively, it might be possible to try and piece together some figures from the bottom up, buy adding together figures from the UN, EU, and some of the major NGOs, etc, however, I think this might be pretty tricky, though looking at the way individual organisations spend their money might provide some useful touch points which could be used in the campaign.
I hope to turn all the data we get into an interesting infographic, and any work provided will of course be fully credited.
I'm specifically looking to quantify the proportion of overall communications spend that takes place in developing countries themselves - this is the section we're really targetting as part of our campaign. Education is a key component of development work - prevention is always better than cure, and making this communications work more widely available in a 'free to air' database under Creative Commons licenses would certainly save lives. It would be great if you could help quantify just how many.
Having done a little thinking about this, I reckon there are two possible approaches – one is to start from the top and work down – looking first at the global aid budgets, then the average communication spend as a percentage, and then the percentage of that spent in the developing world.
Alternatively, it might be possible to try and piece together some figures from the bottom up, buy adding together figures from the UN, EU, and some of the major NGOs, etc, however, I think this might be pretty tricky, though looking at the way individual organisations spend their money might provide some useful touch points which could be used in the campaign.
I hope to turn all the data we get into an interesting infographic, and any work provided will of course be fully credited.
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Start here for the EU http://ec.europa.eu/echo/media/publications/annual_reports_en.htm
This is their annual report on hummanitraian aid. Page 96 discusses communications and mentions that they partner up with other majors organisations, such as WFP, to deliver their message. Extracting out how much of that went on Comms in the developing worlds, and was their responsibility, could be tricky.
They also indicate on page 99 they spend 97% of their budget on aid, 2% on admin expenditure and 1% on support expenditure. Where Comms would fall I don't know and I can see an argument for it being in all three. And if I was writing this report, I'd make damn sure it was in the first pot ; )
Depending on where you are based, I'd suggest making some Freedom of Information requests first of all and see where that gets you.
posted by fatfrank at 2:43 AM on May 21, 2010