Editorial
A reintroduction
A reintroduction
Just over three years after the last issue was published in November 2003, ‘The Courier’ is back with a new look. Renowned as the magazine of ACP-European Union cooperation, ‘The Courier’ was launched in 1970 – before the creation of the ACP – as the journal documenting relations between the then EEC (European Economic Community) and the ‘Associated African and Malgache Countries’ (EAMA), governed at the time by the Yaoundé II Convention.
The Lomé Convention and the Cotonou Agreement marked the successive enlargements of the European Union and the ACP Group, without bringing too many changes to the nature of the publication. While very specific on technical aspects of cooperation, ‘The Courier’ was quite vague when it came to the political realities in many ACP countries, due to enduring Cold War rivalries of that time. In the early 1990s, ACP-EU cooperation acquired a major new pillar in the form of ‘political dialogue’. The magazine evolved to underscore these developments and the views of others could now be fully heard.
In current institutional jargon, ‘The Courier’ is an ‘all ACP project’, implemented by the ACP Group Secretariat and financed by the European Development Fund. To bring it more into line with the new realities of global communication, the ACP Secretariat and the Commission decided to outsource the publication and it is now managed by external experts. The official contract manager is EuropeAid (European Commission) while the ‘Editorial Board’ – that directs the Courier’s editorial policy – is co-chaired by the Secretary General of the ACP Group and the European Commission’s Director General for Development.
The heart of ‘The Courier’ is an editorial team of four – balanced between men and women and between the EU and ACP –, an assistant editor and a webmaster. The editorial team is backed up by a small group of freelance associates, also made up of of ACP and EU professionals. A network of journalists and experts based in most of the ACP countries and the EU also contribute to ‘The Courier’ as necessary.
