Global Press Institute

Global Press Institute (GPI) is an award-winning, high-impact social venture that uses journalism as a development tool to educate, employ and empower women in the developing world to produce high-quality local news coverage that elevates global awareness and ignites social change.

GPI is building a network of professional women journalists throughout the developing world who earn a fair wage for reporting on their local communities. Their unique coverage of issues overlooked by mainstream media contributes directly to the development and empowerment of their communities, brings greater transparency to their countries, and changes the way the world views their people and cultures.

GPI offers women a unique training-to-employment opportunity that builds the skills necessary for success in professional journalism, and then provides them with long-term employment. Each woman who completes the training program receives a job offer at a fair wage to become a GPI reporter. To date GPI has trained and employed more than 150 women around the world.

GPI aims to solve two pressing global challenges:

• Women’s empowerment: GPI facilitates systemic change in the lives of women by using media as a tool to help transcend inequalities. GPI reporters come from underprivileged, underrepresented communities in 25 developing countries. Our journalists include members of the untouchable caste in Nepal and India, former sex workers in Africa and indigenous women in Latin America. Most reporters have no professional background in journalism and limited formal education.
• The decline of quality international journalism: The news media shapes public opinion to an extraordinary degree. In an age of increasing global interconnectedness, it is more important than ever for media in the U.S. to accurately inform the public about issues in the developing world – particularly those affecting women, whose concerns are often overlooked. Yet over the last 25 years, foreign news in daily newspapers has declined by 53 percent, and more than 60 percent of all foreign bureaus have been closed. Furthermore, coverage produced by women accounts for less than 10 percent of all news coming out of developing countries, and less than 2 percent of sources in international news stories are women. GPI’s women journalists, as natural storytellers with local knowledge and access, report on issues in their countries and communities that are often ignored by foreign news media.

Our reporters generate high-quality news content that is published on GPI’s online news site, the GPI Newswire, and is syndicated to more than 50 news outlets around the world, ranging from small, local language publications to major mainstream outlets such as NPR, Reuters, UPI, and the Huffington Post. Thanks to GPI’s existing syndication partnerships, over 5 million people in 160 countries read GPI stories every year.