Strengthening Strategic Communications Efforts in East Africa
We work at the nexus of strategic communications and international development to meaningfully engage USAIDS’s target audiences in East Africa.
USAID/Kenya and East Africa (KEA) is one of the most prominent USAID Missions in Africa; USAID/Somalia oversees a diverse portfolio in a complex and volatile sociopolitical context. Both missions seek to leverage communications as a strategic tool to build greater understanding of USAID’s priorities and results.
Through the USAID Communication for Development Support (C4D) project, MSI provides strategic advice and hands-on assistance. These efforts contribute to a greater understanding of USAID’s partnership with the governments and people of Kenya and Somalia, advance development objectives, and ensure local voices and perspectives inform programs.
As the Mission’s strategic thought partner, we use targeted approaches and campaigns to achieve specific objectives. MSI works collaboratively with mission staff, implementing partners, local partners, and target audiences to develop and disseminate authentic content that reflects community perspectives and inspires discussions on development issues. For instance, we are playing a lead role in the development and implementation of two branded USAID audio series that will air on local radio stations in Kenya and Somalia.
Working on an on-demand basis, we support audiovisual content production, graphic design, and wide content distribution to highlight USAID’s development investments and amplify the real-life impacts those investments have on Kenyans and Somalis. MSI also leads the management and performance measurement of USAID/KEA’s social media channels, which help increase visibility and engagement with over 10 million social media users in Kenya, largely urban and youth. In December 2023, a social media takeover by a sexual and gender-based violence expert to mark 16 Days of Activism resulted in more than 245,000 impressions and more than 13,000 engagements.
We also explore synergies between communications and monitoring, evaluation and research to improve and measure the Mission’s communications efforts in line with programming, using tools like behavioral science, polling, surveys, focus groups and media monitoring. In collaboration with the Mission’s Development Outreach and Communications (DOC) team, MSI also assists with training and supports a network of more than 50 communications professionals working on USAID-funded projects across the region.
This project builds upon more than a decade of helping drive communications approaches in partnership with USAID/KEA, first under the Kenya Support Project from 2012 to 2018 and then under the KEA Development Outreach and Communications Support Project from 2018 to 2022.