Moving Beyond: Eleven Years of Media for Peace work in West Africa

Over eleven years and nine projects, Xchange Perspectives e.V. carried out Media for Peace trainings and Masterclasses across West Africa. This collaboration with our partners resulted in the production of more than a hundred films. Moving Beyond is the last instalment of this project series. 

• Watch the'Moving Beyond'films

Moving Beyond (2023–2026) concludes a long series of projects supporting the Film Network West Africa (FNWA) and its five member organisations: Cinéma Numérique Ambulant in Togo, NAEAL in Liberia, SLADEA in Sierra Leone, the University of The Gambia, and YMCA Ghana. The project was realised by Weltfilme e.V. and financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Across the three years, the partner organisations expanded and professionalised their training programmes and deepened their links with one another.

The aim throughout was independence: film sectors in all five countries still need qualified people, and affordable training is scarce. Their programmes stay practice-oriented — every course includes film productions in which trainees are supervised by their trainers, on subjects the teams themselves consider urgent. The films travel to festivals, mobile cinema tours and national television before going online.

Eleven Years, Media for Peace

Moving Beyond did not begin in 2023. It closes a chain of projects reaching back more than a decade — and across all of them, XcP's contribution varied, but its core was the same: Media for Peace.

It started in Freetown in 2015 with Sierra Leone On the Mend. Twenty-four young Sierra Leoneans, none with film experience, were trained weeks after the country was declared Ebola-free. They learned camera and editing — and alongside it, Media for Peace: how to think about conflict, violence and peace, and what a film can do with that understanding. Eight films came out of it. A year later, Sierra Leone On the Rise trained sixteen more and gave advanced training to eight of the first group, on gender equality, with the equipment staying in the country.

In 2017, On the Move set the pattern that everything after it followed. Eight filmmakers from Sierra Leone, Ghana and Liberia met in Freetown, made four films — and the following week trained 24 others themselves. XcP trained trainers; the trainers trained their own countries.

All On Board repeated it in Koforidua, Ghana, in 2018, ten trainers passing the work to more than twenty. Make a Difference brought in The Gambia in 2019, with 36 filmmakers and six films on democracy, human rights, environmental justice and entrepreneurship.

Then, the model was tested. When the pandemic made the planned training in Ghana impossible in 2020, Right On moved online: trainers coached remotely taught over 200 young people in five countries, and 27 films came out of it. Film Forward followed in 2021 with 38 filmmakers and 18 films, and Looking Closer in 2022 with 16 more, on migration, domestic violence, sexual abuse and political polarisation.

The people at the heart of Media for Peace

The films are the visible part. The durable part is the people.

Each country has its Media for Peace trainers, and after every training of trainers they travelled onward — to Makeni and Freetown, to Koforidua and Accra, to Monrovia and the counties, to Banjul, to Lomé — teaching filmmaking and Media for Peace in their towns and communities.

Some took it further than film. In Liberia, the Peace and Media Education Team (PMET) used Media for Peace for something the projects had never asked of it. Ahead of the Senate elections of December 2020, with the threat of election violence rising, PMET and XcP ran Media for Peace Summits in three areas with a history of violence — Lofa, Grand Bassa and Monrovia — bringing together media, religious leaders, politicians, civil society and youth organisations under the theme 'Peace Before Positions'.

This is one of the many moments where the Media for Peace framework was more than a training or a workshop; it became something the partners owned.

Seeing local partners adapt and lead the framework in their contexts laid the foundation for the project’s ultimate milestone. The final phase marked a complete transition from external facilitators to total local ownership, culminating in the closure of Moving Beyond in April 2026. Before wrapping-up, Felix Hoch conducted a final masterclass in Ghana, while Dominik Lehnert provided written feedback on scripts developed by the teams. Alongside Leila Bendra, the coordination team spent the final year collaborating with local partner organisations across five countries to adapt the curriculum into a concise format designed for internal delivery, all while preserving the core Media for Peace pillars and values.

Spanning eleven years, nine projects, and over a hundred films, the initiative achieved its ultimate goal of long-term sustainability. While remaining available for remote support, XcP steps back with immense pride as Moving Beyond completes its mission: a self-sustaining network fully equipped to carry the work forward into the future.