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Jordan and the World Celebrate the World Development Information Day
Jordan and the World Celebrate the World Development Information Day
Thursday, 24 October 2019

On Thursday, Jordan and the world celebrate the World Development Information Day, which is celebrated on the 24th of October every year. The annual celebration aims at drawing the attention of the world's public opinion to development issues and the necessity to improve the international cooperation to resolve them, and enhancing information sharing and mobilization of public opinion, especially among youths, to increase the awareness of development problems in societies.

Development Media is the type of media which aims at using multi communication media by means of good planning and coordination to improve social and economic conditions in the society. Moreover, it seeks to increase community participation in all development operations and transfer it to a community that supports the development process by increasing awareness in this regard, along with its significant role in gaining the support of decision-makers in societies towards supportive policies to achieve development.

In a special press release on this occasion, the Higher Population Council emphasized the media’s importance in supporting and assisting population and development issues, along with achieving the sustainable development goals as it has an active and vital role in increasing society's awareness and gaining the support of decision-makers in societies towards these issues. Consequently, this will lead to achieving progress and prosperity in different sectors, which will reflect positively on the Jordanian society.

From its faith in the importance of the media’s role in supporting population and development issues, the HPC stated that it has prepared a National Population Media Strategy (2018-2022) that aims at building a media agenda to support the national efforts that are directed towards investing and achieving population opportunity. The purposes of the media agenda can be achieved by building specialized professional media capacities in the development and population field, providing population information with high quality and enabling the media to access it, increasing the role of the media in establishing a - political, organizational, and legislative- environment that supports population opportunity. Furthermore, these agenda aim at activating the media’s role and its functions in increasing the awareness of individuals and the society to adopt supportive orientations of population issues, indicating that the HPC has prepared an operational plan for the strategy for (2019-2020) in cooperation with the related national parties.

The strategy is designed around the idea of having an active Jordanian media that is influential in creating development-supporting community attitudes and behaviors and capable of positively impacting population and development policies. It also seeks to promote community access to demographic information and affect the behaviors and attitudes of the Jordanian public and public policies through professional media that helps them improve the quality of life.

HPC noted that the main reasons behind developing the strategy were the public’s perception of how important it is to promote the media’s role in supporting population policies and integrating the demographic dimension and changes in the economic and social planning process on both the national and local levels, which all entail having adequate policies concerned with the demographic structure and its changes and implications on education, training, employment, health, resource distribution and other needs. Another reason behind the strategy was the great population increase as a result of the current instability in the Arab Region.

The HPC further indicated that during the last decades, Jordan has provided a model of success among developing countries in using the media for development goals. Jordan Radio and Television have an active role in stimulating support for population issues, achieving development goals and contributing in providing an incubator environment through awareness, building attitudes, and affecting behaviors, reaching positive social and cultural change. Regarding the rapid growth of the Jordanian media sector and the diversity of its means, the media’s interest in population and development issues has decreased during a time during which there should be significant media support in this regard as Jordan is facing difficulties and challenges in its path to achieving development in many sectors.

The HPC affirmed that the population and development media in Jordan are in need of a strong boost in presence and positive interaction with the different national development engines, and in benefiting from the world’s successful experiences and building on them to serve national development goals, in addition to the need to develop tools and content in line with the major transformations witnessed by the media and national development and population priorities.

The HPC stated that, through its activities and media initiative, it always seeks to enhance the role of media personnel in supporting population and development issues, and raise their competencies and abilities in the use of media arts to support such issues. Moreover, the HPC is always working to provide media personnel with all the relevant information to benefit from in the preparation of media materials.

At the global level, development media is essential in contributing to the progress of societies and achieving sustainable development. The issue of the media and its role in this field represent countries’ main concern in the recent years, as all countries compete in terms of the ways and means used and all available human and material capabilities to develop and improve their societies, since the development process represents the basic criterion for cultural change for any society aspiring for progress and development, and also intervenes in the details of political, economic and social relations in all developed and developing societies with varying proportions.