Nepal

Center for Media Research – Nepal (CMR Nepal) is an autonomous, research and policy-oriented, not-for-profit non-governmental policy think tank registered with Nepal Government and Social Welfare Council  and is based in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.

CMR-Nepal’s main focus is to enhance the knowledge content of policy making and media development by conducting researches aimed at informing Nepal’s policymakers and media stakeholders.

Nepal’s Election Commission published their electoral code of conduct in 2015, which established standards and regulations for various institutions, persons, bodies and authorities. The code includes language for the mass media in preventing the publication, broadcast, or dissemination of “baseless information in favor of or against candidate or political party on electronically used social networks such as S.M.S., Facebook, Twitter and Viber”. Clauses such as these work to ban deliberate sharing of fake news during Nepal’s election period. 

The Citizen Helpdesks are a pioneering citizen feedback, dialogue and community voice platform to ensure accountability in the development process. The Helpdesks have now collected critical information from hundreds of communities across Nepal, Liberia and Mali, solving daily problems for citizens and closing the loop on challenges related to everything from migration, to human trafficking, to natural resource management and security issues. It consists of an educated group of volunteers led by local journalists who act as two-way information collection and dissemination units.