Time for climate action. The journey of 24 journalists reporting from the African frontline of the global climate crisis

COP27, the UN Climate Summit that took place 6^th – 20^th November at the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh is over – and so is the journey of the 24 African journalists that took part in the Danida Fellowship Centre’s learning programmme “Reporting from the African frontline of the global climate crisis”. Their outputs exceeded expectations with more than 100 pieces of climate content in 30 prominent African media reaching 100.000s people.

Climate stories featured in African media are often sourced from international news platforms. Therefore, many climate stories in African media do not fully explore issues and challenges relevant to African audiences. Nor do the international stories make use of African research knowledge and locally available climate expertise – or place the local knowledge in a global context.

Paving the way for evidence-based climate stories
On this background, the learning programme “Reporting from the African frontline of the global climate crisis” aimed to pave the way for knowledge-based climate news and feature stories relevant to Africans.

The programme started in Denmark with exposure visits to sustainable, climate-friendly solutions and meetings with climate negotiators, media specialists, and representatives from the private sector and from civil society organizations. It moved on to Tanzania, where the journalists collaborated with climate change researchers and focused on science journalism, constructive journalism, and African-based climate campaigning. Finally, the group of journalists took part in the first week of COP27.

COP27 was Africa’s COP
Long before COP27 opened, it was dubbed Africa’s COP. This nickname not only referred to the African location of this year’s UN Climate summit but also reflected the fact that voices on the continent were calling for Africa to get something meaningful from COP27.

Despite Africa contributing only 4% of global gas emissions, many of the societies most challenged by the effects of climate change are in Africa.  However, it was far from certain that COP27 would deliver for Africa and other developing regions of the world: Would an agreement on the controversial issue of loss and damage be one of the results of COP27?  Would the richer and more carbon-intensive countries agree to the establishment of a global climate fund and increase the climate financing to the developing countries? And would the negotiation process and the results be reported back to the people of Africa in ways that meet the needs of the target audience?

The outputs
During the learning programme, the 24 journalists did their utmost to report on Africa’s climate crisis and to unpack the most important topics for their audiences in a meaningful way. To guarantee an outlet for their outputs, a criterion to take part in the programme was that the journalist’s own media would get them accreditation to COP27. Another criterion was that the journalists should deliver a set of mandatory outputs making use of the journalistic tools provided by the programme, and building on their direct access to climate experts, negotiators, public authorities, the private sector, and NGOs in Denmark, Tanzania, and during COP27.

With more than 100 pieces of climate content in 30 prominent media from across the continent reaching 100.000s people, the 24 journalists’ outputs exceeded expectations. See them here 

In addition, the journalists made 23 daily blogs featured on Danida Fellowship Centre’s Instagram throughout the programme, highlighting their main takeaways. Watch them below.

The journalists came from Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. They were nominated for the learning programme by the Danish embassies in their country of origin.