Resources for Africa: everything journalists need for climate change reporting
PICTURE: Akil Mazumder/Pexels
Dialogue Earth and the Wits Centre for Journalism (WCJ) Africa-China Reporting Project (ACRP) has held an important series of Workshops at Aga Khan University in Nairobi, Kenya, under the banner, ‘Reporting Climate Change in Africa’.
The Workshops, which took place on 21 February 2025, convened with selected and invited journalists, media scholars and professionals, engaged by trainers and expert representatives to develop their skills and knowledge on climate change reporting within African contexts.
The Workshops followed the launch of a free online course developed under a ground-breaking collaboration between four global organisations – Dialogue Earth, the ACRP, Development Reimagined and the China Global South Project – under the funding framework of the Africa Climate Foundation (ACF).
The collaboration also yielded 10 reporting grant awards (as announced on Dialogue Earth’s Facebook and X platforms), with the Reporting Climate Change in Africa project aiming to help build the field of climate journalism on our continent.
The wider development of journalism and environmental civil society on the continent will be supported, with opportunities created for media professionals, organisations and NGOs that demand a greater voice in the public sphere
African voices excluded from global conversations around climate change and the just transitions, there is scant awareness of climate change solutions appropriate to our realities.
The continent’s choices of partners and technologies remain contingent on external drivers, and stakeholders lack the tools for making proactive choices for their own climate and environment initiatives.
Informed media coverage is required to improve public participation and support awareness of risks and opportunities in partnerships and initiatives related to climate change mechanisms.
For instance, what is the impact of those on grassroots, technological and financing options, and on African resources and manufacturing in the renewable energy industry?
African media can play a greater role in showcasing our own perspectives and needs in scrutinising governments’ and business roles in partnerships with global players and investors
The Workshops featured expert-led discussions, interactive sessions and skills training on climate change coverage, media and education in Africa as it engaged modules presented in the online course, as well as the Climate Reporting Toolkit Africa and reporting guides.
Insights were given into the applicability of these in reporting African perspectives and contexts, with an emphasis on the voices of women, youth and other under-represented groups.
The Welcome and Opening Remarks at the Workshops were given by the Associate Dean at Aga Khan University, Professor George Nyabuga.
He reflected on how the planet would thrive without the devastating impact human beings have had on it, saying ‘the environmental crisis we face demands not only journalists’ attention, but also proactive media interventions that can help steer us towards sustainable solutions’.
‘We need a media which understands these issues … as sense is not often common’
Professor Nyabuga emphasised media’s role in making sense of socio-economic issues, and reflected on Trump 2.0, where news and information is sensationalist, asking: ‘How do we report and inform society, in a distilled way, [with] less … fake news and disinformation?’
Professor Nyabuga directed the audience to ask significant questions about climate change, while observing the sustainability of journalism itself in reporting these issues. Among the questions were these:
- What is climate change?
- How do we deal with all the conspiracy theories and ensure our reporting is impactful without pandering to the sensational and the misleading?
- How do we handle the mis- and disinformation around climate change?
- How do we know humans are causing it?
- What are the main effects of climate change?
- What are the most significant greenhouse gases contributing to climate change?
- What are the potential solutions to mitigate climate change?
- How can individuals reduce their carbon footprint?
- What are the impacts of climate change on different regions and ecosystems?
- What is the scientific consensus on climate change?
ACRP Co-ordinator Bongiwe Tutu explained that the Workshops came about ‘because we need to take charge of adopting solutions which are appropriate to the realities of African people’.
‘The Workshops are to build an informed media and communications landscape in Africa, to improve public participation and to support greater awareness of the risks and opportunities [in] climate change-related mechanisms and their impacts on the ground level.’
The ACRP is one of a range of projects and grants running within the WCJ, existing among study programmes, scholarships and internships. The Centre provides a rich and exciting range of offerings in teaching, training, research and public engagement, housed as it is at Wits, one of the leading institutions on the continent and globally.
Tutu noted that over the years, the ACRP has grown into a networking hub which has hosted professionals from more than 30 African countries and over 20 countries internationally. The core of its work is to improve the quality of reporting on Africa’s engagements with China through facilitation and capacity-building for journalists and researchers.
Nearly 200 applications were received for the Workshops, 106 of which were from Kenya and the rest from Algeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Morocco, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Burundi, Somalia, Liberia, Togo, DRC, South Sudan, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Rwanda, Cameroon, Namibia, Benin, Madagascar, Eswatini and Egypt.
This offered a significant indication of the need for and interest in opportunities of this nature.
The first such Workshops, held in Johannesburg, received 59 applications, engaging professionals in person from South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and China, and online attendees from Tanzania, Malawi, Lesotho, Zambia, Cameroon and Uganda.
The Reporting Climate Change in Africa initiative has seen impacts through four initiatives:
- the provision of the free course
- the toolkit and the reporting guides
- the 10 grants of up to $1 500 each to enable nuanced coverage on under-reported issues and solutions on climate in Africa, which were awarded to journalists in Botswana, Burundi, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and
- this Nairobi-hosted provision of in-person, capacity-building, training Workshops to enable meaningful exchanges
The ACRP also facilitated a ‘Critical Minerals for the Energy Transition’ workshop in 2023, and facilitated grants for journalists’ training related to ‘Africa-China Relations and the Climate Crisis’, in 2022.
Tutu’s full presentation is available here.
Brian Obara Wang’oma, Impact Editor (Africa) for Dialogue Earth, discussed the significance of the Reporting Climate Change in Africa Consortium, reflecting on and assessing the online course.
He explained that purpose of the initiative: to build a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to make it easy for early-career journalists to enhance their knowledge of climate change issues in Africa on mobile or a desktop.
Furthermore, the objective was to amplify African voices in climate change discourse with the specific intent of providing training to journalists on how to best access and incorporate credible subject matter experts from across the continent into their reporting
The Impact Editor further presented the theory behind the initiative, as well as laying out the target audiences, risks and challenges, execution and expected outcomes, noting that 2 800 journalists from across the continent and abroad enrolled for the MOOC, took it to completion, as confirmed in a final survey.
Obara Wang’oma’s full presentation is available here.
The introductory session was moderated by Njenga Hakeenah, Africa Climate Editor at the China-Global South Project, who addressed participants representing a range of organisations – the range intended to create diversity in the engagements on climate change reporting.
Media bodies, civil society groups, NGOs, community groups and independent bodies took part, with sectors from governments also represented.
Organisations and media represented included The Guardian, Reuters, the Inspire Teenagers Foundation, the Kenya Times, the Nation Media Group, Solidaridad Network: East and Central Africa, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, Migrant Narratives Africa, the Science Media Cafe and USAID.
Session one concentrated on African voices and sources in climate change coverage, with Carlos Mureithi, East Africa Correspondent for The Guardian, and formerly the Africa Climate and Environment correspondent for Associated Press.
Mureithi’s full presentation is available here.
Session two unpacked the role of the media in response to climate change, with trainer Duncan Mboyah, an independent journalist based in Nairobi. Mboyah looked at
- how social media and AI affect climate journalism
- why climate change is difficult subject matter for beginners
- the various trends in climate reporting
- what journalists require in order to tell the climate story well, and
- what needs to happen or change to address inadequacies in African media responses to climate change
His full presentation is available here.
Zeynab Wandati, Sustainability and Climate Editor at the Nation Media Group led the third session on global-regional development and geopolitics. Among the issues covered in this sessions were
- diversification of news sources
- effective storytelling tools which include humanising stories
- localising climate issues
- presenting solutions-based reporting
- using AI tools and mobile journalism, and
- linking climate change as a theme with concerns about health, food security, biodiversity, waste management, water, conflict, security and insecurity, immigration, energy and political instability
Wandati’s full presentation is available here.
Dr Enoch Sithole, Executive Director at the Institute for Climate Change Communication in Johannesburg, and Hakeenah faciliated the fourth session together, presenting the Climate Reporting Toolkit Africa. They showed how it includes:
- historical and current understandings about climate change in Africa
- discussions on the current status of climate change education in the African curriculum, and explores
- gaps and opportunities in climate education in Africa
The Climate Reporting Toolkit Africa’s resources include:
- the Reporting and Story Hub
- the Knowledge Hub
- the Networking Hub
- Myths and Myth busting resources, and
- the guidance of climate reporting experts
Included in the reporting guides are:
- resources for leveraging African indigenous knowledge to combat climate change
- a practical guide for African journalists to the cobalt supply chain in the DRC
- Africa’s Energy Future
- How the Climate Crisis Affects African Food Security
- Why Africa Could be a Global Clean Energy Powerhouse
- Finding Africa’s Voice in the Climate Change Conversation, and
- The Effect of Climate Change on Africa’s Water Systems
Dr Sithole’s full presentation is available here, and Hakeenah’s full presentation is available here.
Session five – Exploring the Reporting Climate Change in Africa MOOC – featured breakaway group discussions under facilitator Ivory Kairo from Development Reimagined. Its six modules were presented, these being:
- the Introduction to climate change
- Reporting climate change for beginners
- Climate change and Africa: The Big Picture
- Tailoring reporting to African audiences Africa’s climate solutions, and
- Your African climate intervention
The final session, under Tutu, presented key elements to writing and developing reporting grant proposals, and is available here.
Closing remarks were given by WCJ Director Dr Dinesh Balliah, who shared important factors to consider when reporting on climate in Africa, highlighting the importance of learning and understanding how science works, and being intentional in reflecting that.
She said journalists need to familiarise themselves with scientific jargon to report adequately, and emphasised the importance of building on the databases of experts in Africa, directing participants to ‘spend time’ on this in climate reporting
She also spoke of the necessity of context and demonstrating regional integration within storytelling, saying ‘we have failed to join the dots with people in our neighbouring countries’.
Every story has a thread running through it, said Dr Balliah, and issues affecting one community may correlate with another, these being the gaps which can be explored in reporting climate issues.
That said, she expressed concern about an ‘extractive culture’ in which communities are sometimes ‘used’ by journalists: ‘We do not go back to our communities [to inform them of the impact of what was reported].’
She recommended
- building closer collaborations and access to networks
- building and joining listening clubs and reading clubs, and
- working with community radio stations as they currently struggle to produce content
To promote development of the initiatives around climate reporting in Africa, with informed, in-depth understanding of the needs and ideas of media scholars and professionals, the Reporting Climate Change in Africa consortium prepared a participant survey, which is available here.
