Academic research makes a crucial contribution to development but many a times, findings are kept within the research community. The media can play a part in communicating this knowledge to a wider audience.
Policies and practices are more likely to benefit society when they are informed by research knowledge. By clearly communicating research to a wide audience – whether this is development practitioners, policymakers, civil society representatives or the general public – it can inform public debate and scrutiny. Ultimately this leads to more relevant and sustainable development efforts.
The mainstream media can play an important role in communicating research to a range of audiences in ways that make it easy for people to understand how the research relates to them, their community and society at large.
However, we know that effective communication of research through the media is not straightforward. It depends on factors such as the capacity of the media and their professionalism as well as environments that allow open, vibrant and critical public debate.
It relies on the willingness of research institutions to recognise the value of communicating research to non-academic audiences, and to engage with the media and other communicators. Research funders are in a position to encourage and support institutions to do this. Communicating Tax and Governance research is one area we are working on in East Africa.
Through our Relay Program we connect journalists and researchers by helping academics make their work more widely known through the media and encourage journalists to see research as an important resource for their reporting. In partnership with Panos London, we offer fellowships for journalists to report in-depth features based on research findings and run workshops to enhance researchers’ understanding of how the media work.
In one of our workshops, participants conceived an idea of how to further their relationships and what they agreed on was to develop a forum where they would be able to debate issues relating to tax and governance as a means of extending the debate beyond the workshop. We hope this forum would ultimately create a vibrant civil society that would question and critic how their leaders manage tax and governance issues.
taxandgovernanceforum
