3 Ways Media Monitoring Can Boost Policy Reform

Media Monitoring: An opportunity to boost policy reform in the Caribbean

In the Caribbean, several organizations are continuing to show interest in policy reform to meet the needs of the sustainable development goals which ultimately seeks to increase the standard of living for everyone with a chance to a better quality of life. And whilst this line of action has been challenging, organizations are still pushing through. A historical narrative of ‘politicians never listen to the people or our voices are not heard until election’ is cemented in media interviews, reports, public gatherings, and protests. As modes of communication adapt to changes in technological advancements, so too should data collection.  So the question remains, what can Caribbean policymakers do to ensure everyone is being served?

Monitoring and evaluation are essential parts of the policy cycle, since it facilitates evidence-based policy design and implementation, increasing the policy’s accountability and transparency, demonstrating achievements towards policy objectives, and assessing the policy’s effectiveness, efficiency, and results.

3 ways that Media Monitoring can boost policy reform in your country:

Prioritizing Issues

Issues-based monitoring can help policymakers identify which issues should be prioritized according to public opinion and news reports. Who is saying what? Where? What key messages or issues are repeatedly covered in traditional media or by social?

Using media monitoring can help strategize future communications regarding issues by identifying who is talking about them and what they’re saying. Using archived media data, governments can also study similar issues in the past and improve insights for future communication plans. In addition to this, media monitoring allows policymakers to gather information, not from one particular place but from various regions which will create the opportunity to analyze how an outcome was reached by different leaders.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there have been continuous public gatherings, petitions, and social media discussions and forums on issues such as access to human rights focusing on areas like period poverty,  human rights, access to proper health care, police brutality, and education reform. Using our media monitoring and social listening tools offers the proper analysis of these issues from various media platforms outside of on-the-ground data gathering.

Gathering unique feedback

Governments are elected to serve, so who would be better to get solutions from, other than the people themselves? Our traditional media monitoring services are quite valuable when seeking to gather recommendations from the public and NGOs in the field of climate change, education reform, police brutality, gender-based violence (GBV), and public health. In the Bahamas, there has been an ongoing debate on GBV specifically marital rape. As it stands, the current policy does not incriminate a man or woman within wedlock who may have caused this nature of harm to their partner. Former prime minister Hubert Ingraham of The Bahamas in a report says that the Bahamas lacked the support needed to reform the law.This is an issue that can be improved with feedback from the public, human rights activists, and grassroots organisations that serve victims and survivors of the said harm.