Media for Development: Communicating Impact

Why Study Media for Development?

Media in development is not marketing. It is an accountability mechanism, a tool for shifting power, and often the only way communities can make their experiences visible to decision-makers. When we treat it as a communications function rather than a programmatic one, we miss its most important applications.

Beyond the Cause

Move past the cause-impact gap. Learn why development communication overwhelmingly focuses on problems, what it costs, and how organizations like ASER and GiveDirectly have charted a different course.

Ethics of Representation

From consent and dignity to the politics of who tells whose story. Rigorous frameworks for navigating the ethical minefield of development imagery, storytelling, and failure reporting.

Indian Models

Deep dives into PARI, Khabar Lahariya, and Video Volunteers: three Indian organizations that have fundamentally reimagined who produces media, for whom, and to what end.

"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete." — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Module 1: The Cause-Impact Gap

Development communication overwhelmingly focuses on problems rather than solutions, on need rather than evidence. This module examines why that gap exists, what it costs, and what it looks like when organizations do it differently.

The Communication Imbalance

Development communication overwhelmingly focuses on problems rather than solutions, on need rather than evidence. Content analyses of INGO annual reports consistently find that imagery of need and suffering dominates, while evidence of programme outcomes occupies a small fraction of visual space. This imbalance is not accidental. It reflects a funding model where emotional appeals to donor sympathy consistently outperform evidence-based impact reporting in driving donations.

The Awareness Trap

"Raising awareness" has become development's most comfortable output. Organizations claim success by counting how many people saw a campaign, attended an event, or shared a post. But awareness rarely translates into behaviour change, policy shifts, or improved outcomes. The awareness trap is seductive because it is measurable (impressions, reach, clicks), attributable (to the organization's effort), and emotionally satisfying (people care!). What it is not, in most cases, is evidence that anything changed for the people the program was meant to help.

Pratham's ASER: Communicating Uncomfortable Findings (India)

Pratham's Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has been documenting India's learning crisis since 2005. The findings have consistently been uncomfortable for governments: despite near-universal enrollment, roughly half of Grade 5 students cannot read a Grade 2 text. What makes ASER exceptional as a communication model is that it refused to soften its message for political palatability. The data was presented plainly, without hedging, and was made freely available. The result was that ASER findings became unavoidable in education policy discussions, ultimately influencing the National Education Policy 2020. This is impact communication at its most powerful: evidence so clearly presented that it cannot be ignored.

Varna Sri Raman

I have seen dozens of evaluation reports that contained genuinely important findings gather dust because nobody thought about how to communicate them. The gap between evidence production and evidence use is, in my experience, primarily a communication problem, not a research quality problem.

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Module 2: Post-Humanitarianism: Beyond Pity

For decades, humanitarian communication relied on a simple formula: show suffering, provoke pity, collect donations. Scholars now call this the "negative aesthetic" of aid, and its consequences extend far beyond fundraising. This module traces how humanitarian communication evolved, why the pity model is breaking down, and what is replacing it.

Chouliaraki's Framework

Lilie Chouliaraki's work on post-humanitarianism identifies three historical phases in how suffering has been communicated to Western publics. Understanding these phases is essential for anyone designing development communication today, because the shift from traditional to post-humanitarian framings is not just academic. It has concrete implications for what kinds of stories organizations can tell and how audiences respond.

The Compassion Fatigue Problem

Susan Moeller's concept of "compassion fatigue" describes the psychological phenomenon where repeated exposure to suffering imagery leads to emotional numbness. This is not moral failure on the audience's part. It is a predictable neurological response to chronic emotional stimulation. For development communicators, the implication is that the traditional model of showing ever-more-dramatic suffering to break through the noise is self-defeating. Each escalation temporarily works but raises the threshold for the next campaign.

Save the Children UK: "Most Shocking Second a Day" (UK / Syria)

In 2014, Save the Children UK produced a viral video reimagining the Syrian civil war as if it happened in London. A young British girl experiences displacement, bombardment, and family separation over the course of a year. The video was watched over 79 million times on YouTube and generated significant debate. Critics argued it only provoked empathy by making victims look European. Defenders argued that "flipping the script" forced Northern audiences to confront their selective compassion. Both critiques contain truth, and that tension is instructive for anyone designing development communication.

Vandana Soni

In our workshops, we often start by asking participants to audit their own organization's last five social media posts. How many show the problem? How many show evidence of change? The ratio is usually revealing, and the conversation that follows is where real shifts begin.

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Module 3: Who Tells the Story?

The most fundamental question in development media is not what story to tell but who gets to tell it. The history of development communication is largely a history of outsiders telling stories about insiders. Northern organizations narrating Southern realities. Urban professionals interpreting rural lives. This module examines voice, agency, and the power dynamics of development storytelling.

The Ventriloquism Problem

Development organizations routinely speak "on behalf of" the communities they serve. Beneficiary quotes in annual reports are selected, translated, edited, and contextualized by communications staff. The resulting narratives may be factually accurate but structurally dishonest: they present organizational priorities as community voices. Gayatri Spivak's question "Can the Subaltern Speak?" remains as relevant in development communication as it was in postcolonial theory.

Extractive Storytelling

Organization collects stories from communities to serve its own communication needs. Community has no control over how their story is used.

Participatory Storytelling

Community members co-create stories with the organization. They have input on framing and can veto uses they disagree with.

Community-Led Storytelling

Communities own the means of production and distribution. The organization provides training and platforms but does not control the narrative.

PhotoVoice: Cameras in Community Hands (Global)

PhotoVoice is a participatory research methodology where community members photograph their own realities and use the images as the basis for group discussion and advocacy. Originated by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris in 1992 in rural Yunnan Province, China, and formalized in their seminal 1997 paper, it has since been adopted by researchers and practitioners across dozens of countries. The methodology's power lies in its inversion of the typical dynamic: instead of an outsider photographing a community, community members photograph what matters to them. The resulting images consistently surprise external stakeholders because they highlight issues that outsiders had not considered important.

The Consent Spectrum in Practice: Written consent forms are necessary but insufficient. Genuine informed consent requires that subjects understand not just that images will be taken, but how they will be used, where they will appear, for how long, and what narrative they will support. Bond UK's 2019 guidelines recommend a tiered consent process: consent for capture, consent for specific use, and ongoing consent for reuse. Most development organizations currently operate at the first tier only.

Varna Sri Raman

The honest answer is that most development organizations, including well-intentioned ones, practise extractive storytelling. Shifting to community-led models requires giving up narrative control, and that is harder than it sounds when your funding depends on telling a particular kind of story.

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Module 4: Exploitative Imagery and the Question of Dignity

What scholars call the "negative aesthetic" of aid entered mainstream development discourse in the 2000s, describing imagery that exploits the condition of poor people to generate sympathy and donations. But the concept is more nuanced than shorthand terms suggest. This module examines the ethical boundaries of representing poverty, the institutional pressures that produce exploitative imagery, and practical frameworks for doing it differently.

Defining the Problem

Exploitative imagery is not simply "bad photography of poor people." It is a specific representational strategy with identifiable characteristics: subjects are shown as passive, helpless, and anonymous. Context is stripped away. The viewer is positioned as savior. The image is designed to produce a visceral emotional response that bypasses critical engagement. The critical point is that this is a structural problem, not an individual one. Individual photographers and communications officers operate within institutional incentive systems that reward emotional impact over ethical representation.

Radi-Aid Awards: Satirizing the Savior Narrative (Norway)

The Norwegian Students' and Academics' International Assistance Fund (SAIH) created the Radi-Aid Awards to recognize the best and worst in development fundraising videos. Their viral counter-campaign "Africa for Norway" imagined Africans collecting radiators to send to freezing Norwegians. The satire was effective precisely because it inverted the power dynamic, making visible what is normally invisible: the absurdity of reducing an entire continent to a single narrative of need. The Radi-Aid initiative demonstrates that critique itself can be a form of impact communication.

Practical Framework: The Dignity Checklist

Before publishing any image or story involving programme beneficiaries, apply these questions:

1. Would you be comfortable if this image were of your own child, parent, or sibling? If the answer is no, reconsider.
2. Does the subject have a name, context, and agency in the narrative? Anonymous suffering is almost always exploitative.
3. Was consent genuinely informed? "Can I take your photo?" asked by a foreigner with a camera in a power-imbalanced context is not informed consent.
4. What is the image doing that text alone cannot? If the answer is "making donors feel sad," that is not a sufficient justification.
5. Would the subject recognize themselves in this story? If they would be surprised or distressed by the framing, something is wrong.

Vandana Soni

The dignity checklist sounds simple until you try applying it under deadline pressure with a donor report due tomorrow. That tension between ethical ideals and practical constraints is exactly what our coaching sessions help you navigate.

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Module 5: Consent, Power, and Ethical Storytelling

Informed consent in development communication is far more complex than getting a signature on a release form. When a foreign NGO worker asks a beneficiary to share their story, the power differential makes genuine refusal nearly impossible. This module unpacks what meaningful consent looks like in development contexts and offers practical protocols for ethical storytelling.

Why Standard Consent Fails

Standard media consent forms are designed for contexts where the subject has the power to say no. In development settings, this condition rarely holds. A beneficiary who depends on an NGO for services has a rational incentive to agree to any request from that organization. The power imbalance is compounded by cultural norms around hospitality, deference to authority, and the difficulty of refusing a request from someone perceived as a benefactor. Consent obtained under these conditions may be legally valid but ethically hollow.

A useful test: If the subject would lose access to services, social standing, or material benefits by refusing consent, the consent is not free. The burden falls on the organization to design processes that protect subjects from these pressures, not on subjects to resist them.

A Better Consent Protocol

1. Separate consent from service delivery. The person requesting consent should not be the same person providing services.
2. Use visual consent tools. Show subjects exactly how their image/story will be used. Mock-ups are better than descriptions.
3. Allow time. Do not request consent in the same visit. Give subjects time to think, discuss with family, and decline without pressure.
4. Build in withdrawal rights. Consent should not be permanent. Subjects should be able to withdraw their story at any point, and organizations should have processes to act on withdrawal requests.
5. Share the final product. Before publication, show subjects the final version and confirm they are comfortable.
6. Consider children separately. Children cannot give meaningful consent. Parental consent is necessary but not sufficient. The question is whether publication serves the child's interests, not the organization's.

WaterAid's "Real People" Policy (Global)

WaterAid developed one of the sector's more robust consent protocols. They require that subjects see mockups of how their image will be used, are told where it will appear (website, billboard, TV), and are given the right to withdraw. They also rotate images so no individual's story is used indefinitely. Critically, WaterAid separates the consent request from service delivery: the communications team, not the programme team, handles consent conversations. This structural separation reduces (though does not eliminate) the power imbalance.

Evidence on Participatory Media Impact: A systematic review by Tufte & Mefalopulos (2009) for the World Bank found that participatory communication approaches consistently outperformed top-down information campaigns in generating sustained behaviour change. The key mechanism is ownership: when communities produce their own media, they are more likely to trust and act on the content. This finding has been replicated across health communication (Waisbord, 2005), agricultural extension (Coldevin, 2003), and governance accountability (Fox, 2015).

Module 6: Communicating Failure: When Things Don't Work

The development sector has a failure problem, not because programs fail (they do, routinely) but because failures are systematically hidden, softened, or reframed as "lessons learned" without honest accounting of what went wrong. This module examines why failure communication matters, what prevents it, and the emerging models that are trying to change the norm.

The Failure Taboo

A World Bank Independent Evaluation Group analysis found that roughly 30% of projects were rated below "moderately satisfactory" on their six-point outcome scale (encompassing moderately unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, and highly unsatisfactory ratings), yet fewer than 5% of public communications referenced these results. The institutional incentives against honest failure reporting are powerful: staff careers depend on project success, donors punish organizations that report failure, and board members equate admitting mistakes with incompetence. The result is what the sector calls "evaluation burial": inconvenient findings are acknowledged in internal documents but never surface in public communication.

Engineers Without Borders Canada: The Failure Report (Canada / Global)

In 2008, Engineers Without Borders Canada became the first major development organization to publish an annual failure report. The report documented specific project failures with honest analysis of what went wrong and why. The initial response from the sector was shock, but it quickly became EWB Canada's most-read publication. Crucially, the organization did not lose donors as a result. Ashley Good, who led the initiative, noted that transparency demonstrated organizational honesty rather than weakness. EWB subsequently launched AdmittingFailure.com in 2011, and FailFaires, public events where practitioners share failures, spread to dozens of countries through UNICEF and other organizations.

Vandana Soni

The biggest shift I've seen in organizations that start reporting failures honestly is not external. It is internal. When teams know their honest assessments will be shared publicly, the quality of internal analysis improves dramatically.

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Module 7: PARI and the Reinvention of Rural Journalism

P. Sainath left The Hindu in 2014 after decades as India's most respected rural affairs journalist. What he built next, the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), represents a fundamentally different model for documenting development: community-sourced, multi-format, and designed to create a permanent record of everyday rural life rather than crisis-driven coverage.

The PARI Model

PARI's core innovation is treating ordinary rural life as newsworthy. Mainstream Indian media covers rural India primarily through the lens of crisis: drought, farmer suicides, floods, caste violence. PARI inverts this by documenting livelihoods, crafts, migrations, languages, and daily practices. The archive now contains over 2,000 full-length text stories plus thousands of audio, video, and photo pieces from contributors across every Indian state, published in 14 Indian languages plus English. It also hosts the Grindmill Songs Project, a collection of over 110,000 songs by rural women in Maharashtra.

Sainath's Principle: "Journalism of the 833 Million"

Sainath's foundational argument is simple but radical: India's rural population (roughly 833 million at the time of his framing) receives less media attention than the residents of a single South Mumbai neighbourhood. This is not because rural lives are less interesting but because media business models depend on urban, English-speaking, consuming-class audiences. PARI's response was to build a non-commercial platform funded by donations and fellowships, deliberately outside the advertising-driven media model.

PARI Education: Classrooms Without Textbooks (India)

PARI's education programme places its archive in school and university curricula. Students studying economics read PARI's documentation of artisanal livelihoods instead of textbook descriptions. Students studying migration read first-person accounts from migrant workers. The pedagogical effect is that students engage with primary sources documenting real lives rather than secondhand abstractions. Over 180 educational institutions now use PARI content in their curricula, including TISS, Ashoka University, and South Asia Studies departments at US universities. For development practitioners, the lesson is that rigorous documentation has value far beyond its immediate audience.

India's Digital Landscape (2024): India has 820 million internet users, but access remains deeply stratified. Urban internet penetration is 67% versus 38% rural. Only 33% of women in rural India use the internet compared to 58% of men. Language is a critical barrier: 95% of online content is in English, which only 10% of Indians speak fluently. Vernacular content creation, as practised by organizations like CGNet Swara (Chhattisgarh) and Khabar Lahariya (Uttar Pradesh), directly addresses this gap.

Module 8: Khabar Lahariya: Dalit Women Redefining News

Khabar Lahariya began in 2002 as a four-page newspaper run by Dalit and marginalized-caste women in Bundelkhand, one of India's most underdeveloped regions. Co-founded by Kavita Devi and Meera Jatav with support from Nirantar, a Delhi-based feminist organization, it is today a fully digital news organization with over 600,000 YouTube subscribers and nearly 190 million views, covering stories that no mainstream outlet touches. Its evolution from print to digital, documented in the Oscar-nominated film "Writing with Fire" (2021), offers one of the most compelling models for community-owned development media.

What Makes Khabar Lahariya Different

Khabar Lahariya's reporters are from the communities they cover. This is not a stylistic choice but a structural one. When a Dalit woman reporter covers caste discrimination in Chitrakoot district, she brings knowledge that no parachute journalist can match: she knows the power structures, the history, the families, the unspoken rules. She also faces risks that outside journalists do not, which gives the reporting an urgency that cannot be manufactured.

"Writing with Fire": Documentary as Advocacy (India)

The 2021 documentary "Writing with Fire" followed Khabar Lahariya's reporters as they transitioned from print to smartphone-based video journalism. The film was nominated for an Academy Award and brought global attention to the organization. But the documentary also raised questions about the relationship between development media and international recognition. Did the Oscar nomination change what Khabar Lahariya covers? Did it create pressure to perform "empowerment" for an international audience? These tensions are real and worth examining honestly.

Vandana Soni

What strikes me about Khabar Lahariya is that their reporters are doing something that development organizations talk about but rarely achieve: genuine community-led communication. The stories they produce are accountable to their readers because the reporters live in the same communities.

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Module 9: Video Volunteers and the Community Media Movement

Video Volunteers trains community members in India's most marginalized districts to produce their own news videos. Founded in 2003 by Jessica Mayberry and Stalin K, their network of over 200 Community Correspondents across 23 states has produced thousands of videos that have led to tangible policy responses: roads repaired, rations delivered, officials held accountable. This module examines the community media model and its implications for development communication.

The Impact Video Model

Video Volunteers' "Impact Video" methodology is designed not to tell stories for their own sake but to produce videos that generate specific, measurable governance responses. Each video follows a structure: identify a problem, document it, present it to the relevant authority, and record the response. This turns community media from a documentation exercise into an accountability tool. The organization tracks concrete government actions resulting from each video, and individual case studies document impacts ranging from road repairs to ration distribution to arrest of corrupt officials.

WITNESS Guidelines on Synthetic Media: The human rights organization WITNESS has published the most comprehensive guidance for the development sector on AI-generated media threats. Their key recommendations: (1) Establish provenance standards for all published imagery, (2) Never use AI-generated images to represent real communities or crises, (3) Build media literacy into all community communication programmes, (4) Advocate for platform-level content authenticity infrastructure. These guidelines are increasingly being adopted by major INGOs and UN agencies.

Varna Sri Raman

The ~$20-per-video cost with documented government responses should give every development organization pause. We routinely spend thousands on slick videos that donors watch and forget. Video Volunteers spends almost nothing on videos that officials act on.

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Module 10: Data Journalism for Development

Data journalism combines investigative reporting with data analysis to produce evidence-based stories. In development contexts, it bridges the gap between evaluation findings and public understanding. This module examines how organizations like IndiaSpend, Africa Check, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) use data to hold development institutions accountable.

IndiaSpend: Data-Driven Accountability

IndiaSpend, founded in 2011, uses government data to fact-check political claims and track public spending. Their reporting on MGNREGA wage delays, malnutrition data discrepancies, and education spending gaps has influenced policy debates in India. What makes IndiaSpend relevant for development practitioners is their methodology: they start with publicly available government data, apply basic statistical analysis, and present findings in accessible formats. This is not investigative journalism requiring whistleblowers. It is journalism that takes seriously what governments publish and asks whether the numbers add up.

Data Verification

Cross-referencing official statistics with ground-truth data from surveys, RTI responses, and field verification.

Fact-Checking

Systematic verification of claims by politicians, officials, and development organizations against available evidence.

Visualization

Transforming complex datasets into readable charts, maps, and interactive dashboards that non-specialists can understand.

The Measurement Gap: A 2020 survey by the Communication Initiative found that 78% of development organizations track media outputs (publications, reach, impressions) but only 12% systematically measure communication outcomes (changes in knowledge, attitudes, or behaviour among target audiences). The gap exists because outcome measurement is harder, more expensive, and requires methodological rigour that most communications teams lack. This course's MEL module provides frameworks for closing that gap.

Vandana Soni

Every development practitioner already has the data skills to do basic data journalism. If you can run a pivot table on your programme data, you can fact-check a government claim. The barrier is not technical. It is the willingness to make findings public.

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Module 11: AI, Deepfakes, and New Media Ethics

Generative AI tools can now produce realistic images of poverty, displacement, and humanitarian crisis from text prompts. Deepfake technology can put words in the mouths of community leaders and politicians. These technologies create unprecedented ethical challenges for development communication. This module examines what AI means for trust, authenticity, and accountability in the sector.

The Synthetic Media Problem

In 2023, several humanitarian organizations were found using AI-generated images in fundraising campaigns. The images depicted photorealistic scenes of suffering that had never occurred. When discovered, the organizations argued that the images "represented the reality" even if they were synthetic. This defence is untenable. If development communication's value rests on its connection to evidence and reality, synthetic imagery undermines that foundation entirely. An AI-generated image of a malnourished child is not evidence of malnutrition. It is a manufactured emotional trigger.

The core question is not whether AI can make development communication more efficient. It can. The question is whether efficiency gains justify the erosion of trust that synthetic content creates. For a sector that depends on public trust to function, this trade-off deserves serious consideration rather than reflexive adoption.

Varna Sri Raman

I use AI tools daily in my own work. The line I draw is this: AI can help me communicate evidence more effectively, but it cannot replace evidence. The moment you use AI to generate what should be documented reality, you have crossed from communication into fabrication.

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Module 12: Capstone: Your Communication Strategy

This capstone module asks you to apply everything from the course to your own organizational context. You will audit your current communication practices, identify gaps, and develop a realistic strategy for shifting toward more ethical, evidence-based, and community-centred communication.

Project Overview

The capstone demonstrates your ability to integrate course frameworks into a practical deliverable. Unlike academic exercises, this project is designed to be directly usable in your organization. The best capstones are honest about institutional constraints rather than idealistic about what communication "should" look like.

Capstone Communication Strategy

Produce a comprehensive communication strategy document that demonstrates your ability to apply course frameworks to real organizational challenges. This is a practitioner document, not an academic paper.

Project Structure

Evaluation Criteria

Deliverables

Required Submissions:

Communication Strategy Document (3,000-4,000 words): The core deliverable. Must include audit findings, gap analysis, proposed strategy, and implementation roadmap.

Audit Spreadsheet: Structured analysis of 10 communications using the course's analytical frameworks. Include columns for: source, date, who speaks, evidence type, representation spectrum position, consent status.

Sample Revised Communication: Take one piece from your audit and rewrite it applying course principles. Annotate changes explaining what you changed and why.

Measurement Framework: Propose 5 indicators (mix of outputs and outcomes) for tracking your communication strategy's effectiveness. For each, specify data source, collection method, and frequency.

"The question is not whether we can afford to communicate honestly about development. The question is whether we can afford not to."

Course conclusion

Coach Varna

You have made it through the course. The real work begins now. These frameworks only matter if you apply them. The institutional pressures against honest communication are real, but so is the cost of dishonest communication. Choose a challenge you care about deeply for your capstone. The best strategies come from genuine frustration with the status quo, not from trying to impress an evaluator.

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Coach Vandana

If you are finding the capstone daunting, start small. Pick one piece of communication your organization produced this month and run it through the frameworks from Module 1 and Module 3. That single exercise often reveals more than you expect and gives you the foundation for your full audit.

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Resources & Further Learning

Core Texts

Key Organizations & Platforms

Data & Tools

Landmark Papers & Reports

Representation & Ethics:

Seu, I.B. (2010). "'Doing Denial': Audience Reaction to Human Rights Appeals." Discourse & Society, 21(4).

Nathanson, J. (2013). "The Pornography of Poverty." Canadian Journal of Communication, 38(1).

Cottle, S. & Nolan, D. (2007). "Global Humanitarianism and the Changing Aid-Media Field." Journalism Studies, 8(6).

Participatory Media:

Tufte, T. & Mefalopulos, P. (2009). Participatory Communication. World Bank Working Paper No. 170.

White, S.A. (Ed.) (2003). Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower. Sage.

Waisbord, S. (2008). "The Institutional Challenges of Participatory Communication." Social Identities, 14(4).

Evaluation & Measurement:

Lennie, J. & Tacchi, J. (2013). Evaluating Communication for Development. Routledge.

Gugerty, M.K. & Karlan, D. (2018). The Goldilocks Challenge. Oxford University Press.

Deepen Your Learning

Interactive Labs

Free Handouts

All 6 Courses

1:1 Coaching

Media for Development Lexicon

Categories

Sample Terms

Reflection: Choose a term from the lexicon and find a real-world example from your own organizational context that illustrates the concept. How does your specific setting shape how the concept manifests?