Big Changes Start Small - Stories of People Making a Difference

"The articles you find in the dossier feature the varied experiences of people who are trying to tackle major challenges through small steps."

With projects in about 50 countries, DW Akademie works together with people, organisations, and communities striving for constructive dialogue and contributing to an active and informed civil society. To examine the effects of their engagement, DW Akademie has produced a collection of journalistic reports on some of the people and projects they are supporting.

DW Akademie explains that their work is aimed at "strengthening freedom of expression and at enabling people around the world to make free decisions based on independent information, reliable facts, and constructive dialogue. This is particularly important in an age when quality media is increasingly being questioned."

To achieve its goals, DW Akademie specifically collaborates with people and organisations working to make a difference, sometimes in small steps, sometimes in large ones. Together with local partners, DW Akademie seeks to find individual, innovative, forward-looking, and long-term solutions. This work includes improving political and legal framework conditions, advising government agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), promoting the development of sustainable business models and technical innovations, or supporting press and media organisations. Their projects seek to benefit disadvantaged young people, refugees, indigenous minorities, journalists, or the management of large media companies.

Each project portrait in this collection describes the initiative, looking in particular at the impact of the projects, who the people are that are promoting them, and what the people in the individual countries gain. Each portrait also includes a summarised section answering the following questions: Who is involved? How does the project work? What are the difficulties? What has the project achieved? And what are the highlights?

Media initiatives in this collection include:

• Radio Sónica in Guatemala, a station that uses a mobile radio studio to reach young people in economically poor neighbourhoods and give them and their concerns a voice;
• An environmental whistleblower platform in Tunisia;
• Trauma centres in Pakistan that have been set up to help media workers traumatised by terror, violence, and stress get their lives back under control;
• An information literacy project in Namibia that teaches young people to use media consciously, critically, and analytically;
• A citizen journalism project in refugee camps in Lebanon that produces video reports to be published on social media;
• A conflict-sensitive reporting platform set up by journalists across West Africa; and
• An online news site that reports stories and news from remote mountain regions of Georgia.