Changing Lives: Making research real

Changing Lives, a collaborative project between DFID Research and InterPress Service (IPS), a press agency that covers the global South, uncovers a hotbed of the kind of exciting stories that the media are itching to tell. Africa's media have already started to sit up and take notice. Stories from the DFID-funded Research Programme Consortium CRISE - Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity - were posted on the IPS wire-service and have already been used by South Africa's largest black circulation Sunday newspaper City Press. And pioneering work done by another consortium, The Mental Health and Poverty Project, has been picked up by the Mail and Guardian, Southern Africa's largest circulation weekly.

The project has two aims. First, to make more visible the impact of development research to ordinary men and women, second, to work with seasoned journalists to find and tell the human interest stories buried within complex research programmes. By showing that these exist, we hope to create demand from commercial media for closer interaction with their own research communities.

The six-month project will harness the network of more than 50 local journalists working in 40 countries who regularly write for IPS. It will produce multimedia stories that can be used by both radio and print journalists. Monthly 'opinion pieces' are being commissioned from leading researchers on the African continent on a range of topical issues. Stories will be translated into Kiswahili and Portuguese as appropriate.

You can read the stories here, and have new stories delivered straight to your inbox via an e-alert service here. The stories will also feature as news feeds on R4D.