STRENGTHENING OUR GAINS AND ANTICIPATING CHANGE
2024 was the final year of Fondation Hirondelle’s 4-year institutional strategy. Our planning for 2021–24 was marked by the post-Covid environment and the first signs of systemic and geopolitical shifts that intensified in 2024: climate change, the breakdown of multilateralism, increased social polarisation, the war in Ukraine and the renewal of conflict in Palestine. Despite these factors, Fondation Hirondelle continued to pursue its overall objective of promoting peaceful, inclusive, democratic, and fair societies, based on the 16th Sustainable Development Goal. Our contribution consists of media projects that, over the past four years, have achieved: 1) creating high-quality journalism (attracting a yearly average of over 10 million listeners) and spaces for dialogue in the most fragile societies, including Central Sahel and CAR; 2) supporting local media from Ukraine to Myanmar, in Tunisia, Madagascar and, since September 2024, in Benin, enabling them to fulfil their role as public interest media; 3) analysing the impact of media and journalism through around ten studies and research carried out with multiple partners.
With 11 projects led by a team of around 300 people on 3 continents yielding a stable overall volume of activity (-3%) after a steep 20% increase in 2023, 2024 was a strong year for results and development. However, maintaining our presence and providing information that is useful to people and adapted to the volatile situations in which we work requires perseverance and creativity. In Niger, the hesitancy or withdrawal of most public funding providers has forced us to anticipate a decrease in resources and therefore a reduction in production and broadcast time from 3 hours to 1 hour as of February 2025, while continuing to provide news in 5 languages and responding to the ever-increasing needs of the population. In Ukraine, local media based in the eastern part of the country must constantly adapt to wartime conditions.
Understanding people’s information needs and anticipating how and where they consume media was at the heart of the first meeting of our media outlets’ digital content managers in December 2024. This meeting wrapped up a year of training for all our digital teams on topics ranging from mobile journalism (MoJo) to digital tools.
The growth of disinformation and artificial intelligence (AI) poses many challenges and raises questions about the role of the media. It is vital to be able to guarantee reliable information. We are responding to this challenge with an internal agile normative framework (Guidelines on the Use of AI, approved in 2024) and by sharing our experience and recommendations with European and Swiss decision-makers, as well as with academic networks. Lastly, with regards to our organisation, the Board has continued its renewal and welcomes Mr. Robert Roth, a Professor of Law and a former judge of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
Key figures 2024
11 media operations in 10 countries on 3 continents
11 million regular listeners in Africa,
48 % of whom are women*
12,211 hours of audio programming
288 hours of video programming
8,649 web articles
1,329,500 website users
1,100,006 subscribers on social networks (Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, SoundCloud)
411 media supported
1,134 people trained
* Estimated audiences for Fondation Hirondelle’s six programmes and media in Africa (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, DRC, CAR and Madagascar) based on audience surveys carried out by IMMAR in 2023 and 2024, and Kantar at the end of 2020.
OUTLOOK FOR 2025
Our new 2025–28 strategy builds on our focus points for 2021–24 with 3 strategic priorities (see page 29). In 2024, we began laying the necessary groundwork for achieving our objectives:
– Developing new media responses to crises: new projects were developed in Chad and Guinea-Bissau and were launched in early 2025. Activities in consortium with BBC Media Action, governed by the multi-year EU agreement (FFPA) for support to independent media, were approved and will be implemented in 2025 in Mali, Benin and Cameroon (3 of the 25 countries of the project, thanks to the expertise of 9 members of the consortium).
– Highlighting our experience and learning: a Fondation Hirondelle website redesign made all of our audience studies and research reports available in the new Knowledge Sharing section. This facilitates access to knowledge about the social and democratic role of the media in crisis zones and boosts our advocacy efforts in this area.
– Strengthening our institutional capacity: the Human Resources team is implementing a training and response plan to meet our organisation’s future needs. In order to reinforce our finances and reduce our reliance on the public funding currently being cut by many governments, extra efforts are being made to seek funding from private foundations.
IMPACT AND CERTIFICATIONS
The value of our work has been recognised by the republication of many of our productions (for example in Courrier International); people’s feedback in focus groups; field surveys; research (in DRC, CAR and Ukraine); and by JTI certification (Journalism Trust Initiative, the international standard created by Reporters Without Borders), which validates media independence and reliability. Studio Tamani (Mali), Studio Yafa (Burkina Faso) and Radio Ndeke Luka (CAR) achieved certification in 2024. Studio Kalangou (Niger), which became the first JTI-certified African Francophone media outlet in 2022, was also recertified in 2024.