The media nongovernmental organizations are as dependent on foreign funds as the other NGOs of Moldova. The only chance to ensure the durability of the organization is to launch services for money, but these services are often doomed to failure, the executive director of the Association of Independent Press (API) Petru Macovei said in an interview for IPN.
A problem is the absence of qualified personnel. According to Petru Macovei, when a lot of citizens work abroad and the experts formed by the media nongovernmental organizations are easily recruited by international organizations that offer them better conditions and higher salaries, the media NGOs often have to recruit new staff and invest resources in their training.
“As the other civil society organizations, the media NGOs face the problem of ensuring the durability of the initiated programs. We all have strategies and objectives, but they often do not fit the financing programs of the donors. This means that the NGOs must adjust their own plans to donors’ strategies,” said Petru Macovei.
According to the API executive director, durability means ensuring financially the organization’s development even in the situation when you are unable to use foreign funds. In our case, this means providing services for the national mass media organizations. As the press in our country is poor and there are few media organizations that make profit, the possible initiatives of media NGOs to organize for example training courses for money are doomed to failure or there will be achieved modest results.
However, Petru Macovei hopes that this will be possible in several years. He said he was rather skeptical that the law that enables the people to choose to which NGO to transfer 2% of the paid tax will be passed in the next several years. If it is adopted, the implementation of the law will depend on every organization separately, In Romania, where such a law was adopted several years ago, only the churches managed to profit from its advantages. The people do not know much about the CSOs and are not really interested in what they do.
Therefore, the CSOs must focus on promotion so as to convince the people to donate a part of the taxes to a certain organization. In the long run, such a provision can indeed partially ensure the NGOs’ sustainability. Everything will depend on how well we convince the people.
