About us
CoMMPASS (Communicating Migration and Mobility: E-Learning Programs and Newsroom Applications for Sub-Saharan Africa) is a European Union, Erasmus+ funded project that brings together partners from Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Europe to enhance journalism training in reporting migration and mobility.
The project was borne out of the realisation that many newsrooms in SSA fail to address the root causes of migration, and to discuss potential solutions in terms of mobility. By focusing on capacity building in higher journalism education, the project will not only positively impact partner HEIs, but also media industries in SSA. It will also impact societies at large, as the project will promote the quality of information, public discourse and media literacy about migration in countries of origin.
The major goal of the CoMPASS project is to bring together several higher education institutions (HEIs) in Africa to conduct research, conceptualise and implement a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) targeting journalism educational institutions and newsrooms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The focus of the MOOC will be on migration and mobility and its coverage in the media.
Importantly, the CoMPASS project will promote research and communication scholarship to link academic journalism education with journalism practice in an innovative, scientifically grounded and practice-oriented model of researching and reporting migration and mobility.
The CoMMPASS will be implemented by a consortium of core partner higher education institutions (HEIs) in Uganda (Makerere University and Uganda Christian University); Malawi (The University of Livingstonia and Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences); and Burkina Faso (Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo and Université Thomas Sankara). The European lead partner and overall coordinator of the project is Technical University Dortmund in Germany. The other European partner is the University of Lisbon in Portugal.
The overall Principal Investigator of the project is Prof. Dr. Susanne Fengler, the Director of the Erich Brost Institute for International Journalism at Technical University, Dortmund in Germany. The overall academic coordinator of the project is Dr. Michel Leroy also based in the same institute.
A group of associated HEIs will be key dissemination partners and the first to exploit the project’s outcomes. The project also has non-HEIs partners.
The project will run for three years, starting April 2023.
It is a core belief of the project that by promoting the quality of media coverage on migration and mobility in origin countries, there will be enhanced public discourse in all the project partners and associated countries.