Education & Global Development Collection

Stephen Olsson, Senior Producer, President of CEM Productions, and former VP of Programming at Link TV (www.LinkTV.org), has worked as a Senior Media Consultant, Evaluation team leader, supervising producer, and US project director for a number of global development and education projects, in Pakistan, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Mali, Kenya and the Caribbean.

In 1986, he was hired by Boston University as the US project director for the Afghan Media Resource Center, and was responsible for establishing the AMRC as a viable source of news on the Afghan-Soviet war and for hiring senior AMRC staff. Upon termination of the BU grant, Olsson continued at the AMRC as the US Project Director, contracting directly with USIS through March of 1988. Since then, Olsson has, with technical coordination by Parisa Soultani, consulted and supervised the AMRC’s total photo, video and audio and print archives from 1987 through 2004, reporting from all of Afghanistan’s 29 provinces. Archive is available to researchers, writers and the general public at https://archive.org/details/afghanmediaresourcecenter.

Stephen has worked for various media consulting firms, including DAI, Development Associates and most extensively, Internews, for whom he directed the Internews Ukraine project, with a staff of 225, and a 11.5 million dollar USAID grant. Following this, he produced and directed a 6-part TV series on best practices in small-scale business operation for Jamaican and Caribbean broadcasters, and a multi-lingual series for German Television (ARD) on the work of GTZ in Kenya and Mali.