INTERNEWS NETWORK

Internews works to empower communities around the world with reliable news and information from sources they trust, in languages they understand. We support truth-tellers – reporters, citizen journalists, and digital activists – with training and mentorship, material support, and business skills. We build and nurture the kind of local media essential for connecting communities in debates that affect their health, security and livelihoods.

We specialize in working at a deeply local level in some of the world’s toughest places, including conflict and disaster zones, areas of political instability or extreme poverty, and closed states.

We currently work in more than 70 countries to equip journalists and local media with the skills and support they need to report the facts and tell the full story.

Since 1982 we have worked in more than 100 countries, built hundreds of sustainable media organizations, and strengthened the capacity of thousands of media professionals and information entrepreneurs, who in turn have reached millions of people with quality, local information that improves lives.

Our work ensures that people everywhere have access to the information they need to make informed decisions, engage in their communities, and hold power to account.

We seek to realise the potential of a digitally connected world: a world in which evidence-based information advances human progress, enables broad opportunity and accountability, and fuels vibrant civic debate.

“Internews 2025” is our new strategic framework that spells out how Internews intends to advance this vision over the next five years. We have attached our strategy document to our Guidestar profile and encourage you to read it. We describe what it takes to build the healthy information environments that we believe are essential to solving the current information crisis — and building resilience for whatever comes next.

In our strategy, we also define where we need to excel as an organisation to make a meaningful impact toward this vision, exemplified in our
new Strategic Goal:

Over the next five years, as the next 3 billion people come online, we will join with allies who share our vision, including journalists and technologists, data scientists and legal specialists, as well as artists, advocates, and storytellers. Together, we will build healthy information environments in more than 100 countries across the globe. Key to the advancement of our vision and goal are two new commitments we are making with this framework:

First, we are committing to building a Global Change Agenda to complement our deep and long-standing in-country program expertise. This Global Change Agenda will elevate the insights and concerns of our partners to significantly influence the policies, norms, and practices of global players toward building healthier information environments around the world.

Second, we are committing to studying and evaluating the actual changes that occur in a community when their information environment improves over time. We will deeply explore our impact around the world and learn which of our approaches are most effective and worth bringing to scale. We call this “25 x 25,” as we aim to focus research and external expertise on 25 diverse and representative communities around the world through the end of this strategy in 2025. Finally, we recognise that resources are necessary to support this work, so we will
evaluate the potential funding opportunities and steps we need to take to raise the diverse resources necessary to advance this framework — while also ensuring Internews remains financially and operationally resilient into the future.

We are all very proud of the yearlong process behind this new framework, which emphasised listening and learning from the talent and experience of more than 700 staff around the world. This framework reflects the work of our full Internews Alliance and will guide the work of both Internews US and Internews EU in the coming years. We are excited to embark on our next phase and are truly optimistic that we can make a positive change in the world.

Internews has a network of more than 750 active partners that we’ve been working with across five regions, in over 120 countries, for nearly 40 years in more than 100 languages.

Our partners and allies include media outlets, internet freedom advocates, fact checkers, media literacy trainers, social media influencers, information researchers, artists, lawyers, technologists and others. We are able to elevate local voices to the global stage, and to address global challenges at the community level.

We Are Agile:
One of Internews’ greatest strengths is our ability to work where freedom of expression is most threatened and where information is most urgently needed. From remote regions across Afghanistan to communities devastated by earthquakes and tsunamis to some of the most heavily censored countries in the world, our agility is our strength.

We Tackle The Most Pressing Issues:
We bring information solutions to the world’s most pressing issues. As the world increasingly confronts acute crises and complex, long-term development and humanitarian challenges, a common denominator remains: Accurate, evidence-based information empowers people to have a voice in the decisions that affect them. This is true across issues related to climate and environmental crises, conflicts, public health epidemics, natural disasters, forced migration, and severe economic inequality.

We Listen:
We design and implement our programs through deep engagement with local communities. All our work starts with listening to the communities we are trying to serve and designing projects that respond directly to their expressed needs and preferred delivery mechanisms.

We Build Lasting Partnerships:
Internews builds long-term partnerships that strengthen and promote local organizations. Our local partners lead and maintain ownership of the work we do together. Our alliances deliver results.

Internews has a long history of innovation in building healthy information environments, from nurturing nascent media in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1980s to getting information into war-torn Sarajevo in the 1990s. From helping partners provide accurate
news coverage about AIDS in Kenya in the 2000s to pioneering information as a key humanitarian response during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. From supporting only traditional media partners to engaging with a full range of content providers and influencers over the past decade. We are proud to be a high-performing organisation with solid operations and programmes. We have developed a decentralised and entrepreneurial model that supports deeply local approaches as the drivers for the relevance, impact, and sustainability of our programmes in the communities in which we work. Our entrepreneurial model also allows for, and encourages, innovation and the use of appropriate technologies by program staff and our local partners. It gives our organisation the nimbleness required to work in rapidly changing, complex contexts. We’ve been successful because of the strengths of our people and programmes and because of our willingness to turn a critical eye inward. To remain agile and adaptive, we regularly assess what we are good at and what we need to improve, forging new paths if needed.

As we look ahead at our goals for the next five years, we are focused on global challenges and how Internews and our partners around the world will increasingly confront acute crises and complex, long-term development and humanitarian challenges related to critical issues such as climate and environmental crises, conflicts, public health epidemics, natural disasters, forced migration, and severe economic inequality. These issues are multilayered, increasingly interconnected, and often reach across borders, affecting neighboring and regional populations. While each of these issues demands interventions that are tailored to the specific development or humanitarian challenge,
they share a common denominator: Accurate, evidence-based information empowers people to have a voice in the decisions that affect them. True two-way information helps them understand their rights, seek assistance and justice, and make informed decisions about their well-being. As these challenges continue to impact communities globally, Internews will be working to connect its partners to work together and learn from one another, creating a more connected, informed global population.