“Latin America and the Millennium Development Goals” Journalism Award

This initiative is intended to promote higher awareness among journalists and the media of the main themes of the MDGs – poverty and hunger, children's education, gender inequality, maternal health and child mortality, the fight against AIDS and other diseases, and environmental sustainability — their causes and the different ways to solve them. It also aims at assisting in providing more and better information on these issues to the people within the Latin American region.

The contest shall distinguish the three best stories related to the MDGs published in printed media in Latin America and the Caribbean between October 1, 2006, and June 30, 2007.

UNDP's Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Rebeca Grynspan, reminded accredited journalists at a press conference at the United Nations that achieving the goals requires the contribution of the media, "to increase transparency, and to spread more information, so that the public can put pressure on their governments to fulfil the commitments they have made."

"The journalism competition is intended as an invitation, a challenge to journalists all over the region. The aim is to motivate writers to investigate, understand and write on subjects related to the Millennium Goals, and to place the issue of the Goals firmly on the agenda of communications professionals and the media," said the director general of IPS, Mario Lubetkin.

"Rather than articles containing bureaucratic data or percentages of improvement in one or other of the Goals, we are looking for good writing and reporting about poverty and the lack of employment that affects millions of people in the region, about gender inequity and the difficulty of access to education and health services, about the relationship between environmental problems and economic and social degradation, reporting that will help the public to understand the seriousness of the problems we are facing and the importance of efforts to overcome them," he said.

Winners will receive $5,000, $2,500 and $1,000 prizes, and the top five stories will be published in a book, together with a selection of editorial production from IPS on MDGs written during this period.