African Development Journalism Fellowships

Beginning in 2009, the International Center for Journalists will post Knight International Journalism Fellows in four key African countries, where they will lead projects in partnership with influential local media and journalism organizations aimed at improved coverage of poverty and development issues. The fellowships are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Project countries are Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania and Malawi.

The project aims to promote better development policy decision-making in key African countries by providing in-depth coverage of development issues, especially outside the capitals.

Each Fellow will spend one year training and mentoring journalists to produce penetrating coverage of development issues such as agriculture, microfinance, sanitation, health and education. They also will fund in-depth reporting trips outside the capitals for journalists from major media and will establish networks of citizen-journalist stringers who will use mobile phones to relay information on development issues at the village level. The project also aims to improve business-management practices to make development journalism sustainable.

Applications are currently being accepted for the program, which has a rolling deadline. Candidates must be fluent in the language of the region where they are deployed and should have at least 10 years' experience in journalism or related fields such as media-business management. Fellowships are open to any nationality for assignments of up to a year.

The Development Challenge

More than 820 million people live in chronic hunger and more than 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. Many are small farmers in the developing world who face numerous challenges, such as soil degraded from overuse, lack of quality seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and other farming supplies.

Millions in the developing world also face illness and death because of unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene. Diarrhea and other water-borne illnesses thrive where people don’t have safe water, adequate sanitation facilities, or effective hand washing routines. Every year 2.4 million people die from diarrhea and other water-related illnesses. One-quarter of all childhood deaths are caused by unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

Photo credit: Bart Sullivan

These unhealthy conditions impose high costs on the poor, exacerbating poverty.
Over 9 percent of all illness in the developing world results from poor water, sanitation, and hygiene, leading to billions of days of lost work and missed school each year.

Poor people around the world also lack safe, affordable ways to save, borrow, and send money. High transaction costs make it expensive for banks to accommodate frequent, small financial transactions by the poor and to provide financial services in accessible locations. Without these services, the poor resort to informal methods of managing their money—such as hiding cash at home, converting savings into livestock and jewelry, and borrowing from money lenders. These methods are risky, expensive, and inefficient. 
Microcredit—the extension of small loans—has helped millions of people in developing countries improve their lives. It has also shown poor people to be reliable customers who want, and will pay for, financial services. The success of microcredit has helped make it possible to extend a range of financial services—including loans, savings accounts, insurance, and remittances—to many more people in the developing world.

The Media Challenge

In this first decade of the 21st century, advances in agriculture, microfinance, sanitation and communications technology offer an unprecedented opportunity to provide the poor with the tools they need to prosper. Too often in the world’s poorest countries, however, citizens and the grass-roots organizations trying to help them lack critical information about potentially life-saving opportunities. The media in these countries often lack the ability to investigate and expose critical problems in ways that could lead to policy changes and result in greater prosperity and health.

Many programs that seek to help the world’s poor fail to properly address how people actually get the information they need to make better decisions. No development program can be successful without addressing media, from newspapers that influence those with the power to change policy to radio and now-ubiquitous cell phones that are often the only source of information in rural areas.

The Program

With the support of a $2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ICFJ will launch an innovative three-year program to improve news coverage of critical development issues. The program addresses the need for increased information about rural regions, which are affected by policy decisions made in capital cities.

The African Development Journalism Fellowships will build on the success of ICFJ’s Knight Health Journalism Fellowships, also funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Under that program, health fellows work in Africa for a year to improve coverage of complicated health and research issues.