The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications is helping to establish a U.S. State Department-funded journalism training center in Karachi, Pakistan.

The school is working with the project’s leader, Washington-based organization the International Center for Journalists, and Karachi’s Institute of Business Administration, which will house the new Centre for Excellence in Journalism.

“We at Medill are serving as a consulting capacity,” said Medill Prof. Craig Duff. “Some of us will go every once in a while and conduct workshops.”

The center, which is being constructed and is scheduled to open in 2015, offers journalism courses similar to those taught at Medill, Duff said. Medill will provide faculty members or recommend other teachers for the center’s courses, he said.

“There is a definite consensus that there is a great deal of need for journalism training there,” Duff said, adding that Pakistan has seen a “huge burst” of media outlets recently, but the country lacks professional training programs.

Work on the center began about a year ago, Duff said, when Medill and the International Center for Journalists won their bid for a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

“We’re using the great minds of the faculty of Medill to help them build this place,” Duff said. “We’re also going to be working in tandem with Pakistani trainers and they will take it over. We’ll back away after a year or two.”

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