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AFRICAN JOURNALISTS WIN FELLOWSHIPS TO REPORT ON COP-17

UNDP’s Africa Adaptation Programme (AAP) has awarded fellowships to nine journalists from eight African countries to attend the COP17 climate change negotiations in Durban.

Under the AAP’s Media Capacity Building Project the journalists, from Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya, will spend one week at the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change where they will report on the intergovernmental negotiations and receive training and editorial support.

From its base in Nairobi, the Media Capacity Building Project is supporting the professional development of journalists in all 20 AAP countries. The project seeks to introduce a thorough knowledge of the climate change debate to African print, broadcast and web-based journalists and other media professionals. This involves not only helping them build their capacities to track this issue as it evolves, but to play their unique and indispensable role in providing a forum for discussion, informing debate with context and analysis, and contributing to public accountability by reporting on progress or the lack of it.

"The AAP fellowship improves the skills of journalists as they grapple with complex climate change issues," says Jacqueline Frank, coordinator of AAP’s media programme. "It provides a unique opportunity for African journalists to report on events of crucial importance to their countries and to do so with access to those directly affected by the issues, those actively campaigning to redress them and those who can shape the global response; all the while benefitting from professional, logistical and factual support."

ON THE ROAD TO DURBAN

Five of the journalists will first join the ‘Have Faith: Act Now’ campaign’s youth caravan, a convoy of buses on a 17-day overland trek from Nairobi to Durban, through Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Botswana, culminating in a massive inter-faith rally in Durban on 27 November. The campaign was instigated by a pan-African movement of faith communities, leaders and youth who have mobilised to express the widespread desire among Africans for a just and robust outcome at the climate negotiations. These five young journalists were selected out of 30 applicants from around Africa. They will report on the aims and activities of the campaigners and how these relate to the situations in the countries they pass through and the discussions and outcomes at the COP.

"I hope we will be able to carry people’s voices all the way to Durban and deliver them to the negotiators’, says Simegnish Yekoye, a 27-year-old Ethiopian journalist joining the caravan. ‘I want COP17 to be different, and I want to contribute to that by showing the leaders responsible how people at the grassroots level are suffering from global warming and how much they need an immediate solution. I want to show them this isn’t about power or money or how great one country is; this about the survival of human beings and The Earth we live on.’

For more information on the AAP’s Media Capacity Building Project visit
 www.undp-aap.org/workareas/media-capacity

For more information on the We Have Faith campaign visit
 http://www.wehavefaithactnow.org

Contact:
Jacqueline Frank                                                                                       Nancy Njeri
Media Capacity Building Programme Coordinator            ‘We Have Faith’ Media Liaison
jacquelinef@unops.org / +254 702 151 595                          njerinancym@yahoo.com / +254 723 993 689