By Bilal Randeree, Chief Program Officer, MDIF
Across many markets, smaller independent media face the same structural problem. Editorial quality, audience trust and civic relevance are often all present. What is missing is the commercial foundation.
Smaller or early-stage independent media face a structural gap. Many produce high quality content that engages local communities and serves the public interest. Far fewer, however, reach the operational and financial maturity that investment requires. Often, they rely on short-term project grants, lack structured commercial operations and have not built the financial discipline and systems investors require.
Amplify is MDIF’s way of helping promising media companies in challenging markets to bridge that gap.
Where Amplify fits in the investment cycle
MDIF invests in independent media through debt and equity financing. Amplify sits upstream of our regular investments as a structured incubation and pre-investment pathway.
Across the sector, significant resources are directed toward supporting independent media. However, this support often falls short of strengthening operational and financial thresholds required for investment. Early-stage independent media often remain constrained by weak commercial functions, limited revenue visibility and underdeveloped financial management. As a result, the pool of investable opportunities remains low and creates a dysfunctional situation where there exist investors looking to back independent media and there are outlets seeking long-term financial support, but without the fundamentals in place that could get the investors on board.
Amplify is designed to address this pipeline constraint directly. It focuses on helping early-stage media test and refine business models, overcome structural growth barriers and build the capabilities required for investment readiness.
The program works through sustained strategic mentoring, targeted expert consulting in areas such as advertising sales, reader revenue and product development, peer learning within regional cohorts and innovation grants. By strengthening business fundamentals at an early stage, Amplify enables MDIF to identify high-potential ventures sooner and reduce investment risk before deploying capital.
Amplify’s funding structure reflects a broader constraint in the sector. Much of the available funding is time-bound and tied to specific geographies or thematic priorities rather than unrestricted, long-term support. The program is designed to channel this programmatic funding toward building investment-ready ventures, ensuring that region-specific initiatives in markets such as Southern Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Central and Eastern Europe contribute to MDIF’s overall investment pipeline.
What the results show
Recent case studies from Amplify programs in Europe, Asia and Africa show how structured business support translates into operational and financial change in different contexts.
In Europe, a two-year review of Amplify Europe shows consistent gains across participating media. Revenues increased by an average of 78 percent, audience reach by 91 percent and the number of staff by 37 percent, with €43 generated for every €1 of innovation funding. Individual cases illustrate how these results were achieved in practice, from modernizing technology to building out commercial teams.
In Asia, a series of reflections from partners and mentors shows how the Amplify model supports experimentation and adaptation in constrained environments. These include Bangladesh’s satire outlet Earki building a business around humour as civic resistance, Nepal’s Kalam Weekly growing reader revenue, Pakistan’s PPI experimenting with AI, Malaysia’s Suluh evolving from a fact-checking project into a multi-dimensional business, Vietnam’s Luật Khoa shifting from donor reliance to memberships and exile media in Myanmar proving digital revenue is possible.
In South Africa, case studies show how the Amplify model supports organizations in strengthening their core business functions. These include Currency News building a media startup, Likhanyile developing a niche financial product, The Continent redefining its distribution model, Xenor Projects scaling digital production, MambaOnline diversifying income, Pulse FM strengthening community radio revenue, Nthavela building income around local reporting, Cape Town TV building a youth-driven newsroom and Vutivi Business News building a sustainable newsroom.
Taken together, these cases illustrate that media that enter Amplify with informal structures and donor dependency can, with targeted support, develop the operational foundations that make growth possible and investment more likely.
A clear-eyed assessment
While Amplify has delivered strong business results across regions, conversion from incubation to follow-on investment remains lower than required to sustain a reliable pipeline. This is largely due to external market constraints, including limited access to local growth capital, shallow advertising markets and structural barriers to scaling independent media in many operating environments.
Amplify has historically pursued a dual objective: strengthening individual media while also contributing to broader ecosystems, based on the view that investable companies depend on the health of their surrounding markets. As other actors in the media development space have expanded and improved their ecosystem support, the need for MDIF to play this role directly has diminished.
Amplify is now more tightly focused on MDIF’s core comparative advantage: developing a pipeline of investment-ready media companies. The program concentrates on ventures with demonstrable revenue traction and credible growth pathways. Investment-readiness is defined through explicit milestones, including revenue consistency, cost structure discipline and management capacity, with clear checkpoints to assess progression toward MDIF financing.
The investment team is engaged earlier in the process, with direct involvement in selection and oversight to align incubation with investment criteria from the outset. And where appropriate, Amplify risk capital will be structured as investment instruments rather than grants alone, introducing financial discipline earlier and reducing the discontinuity between incubation and financing.
Investing in informed societies
With a renewed focus on using Amplify programs to bridge the investment gap, we will be channeling more resources towards media ventures with a clear growth path. This will help us build a stronger, more reliable pipeline for our investments, while reinforcing the long-term viability of promising independent media, advancing our mission of investing for informed societies.