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Highway Africa’s Reporting Development Network Africa (rDNA) scooped the Climate Hero Award at this year’s edition of the Climate Change Leadership Awards (CCLA) in Johannesburg held recently.
The rDNA received a first place award in Community or Individual Category, which includes CCLA certificate, a R50 000.00 cash cheque and a collection of rare-musical-instruments stamps sponsored by Post Bank and the South African Post Office.
The prize money will enable the initiative to recruit and train many African journalists to report on issues of climate change, said Nqobile Sibisi, rDNA programme officer.
“Africa faces most of the scourges of climate change whilst we are the least carbon emitter, so there is a story there which needs to be told proficiently and truthfully in order to affect policy change,” she added.
“It is Africa's journalists who should do this, and in Africa's terms - and that's what we are driving at with rDNA.”
The award recognised rDNA’s contribution to climate change reporting in the media through education and training especially at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which took place in Durban towards the end of last year.
Sibisi said that rDNA sent a group of nineteen pan-African journalists to cover the conference for different media houses across Africa.
Not only did this group report on all discussions which have direct impact on Africa’s climate agenda, but they interrogated the manner in which issues of climate change, food security, Africa’s development and global sustainability are framed by journalists when they communicate to the general public, she said.
“Our COP17 content became a primary and trusted African voice, which relayed Africa's agenda and interest in the world's climate discussion, in a newsroom which was proliferated with western media, ideals and agenda,” said Sibisi.
The COP17 mission was sponsored by the South African Government’s Department of Environment Affairs (DEA), through the backing of Deputy Director General, Mr Blessing Manale. This exercise strengthened rDNA position as a primary news source on African development.
Although there has been a wider coverage of the COP17 conference, a lot still needs to be done by the media to highlight environmental and climate issues.
“It is high time that we ignore our usual suspects and begin telling stories downstream-up, from the grassroots citizen or farmer whose soil cannot plant anymore because of changing and erratic weather patterns which in turn affects food supply chain and creates a disastrous economic and sustainability issue,” she added.
“These are the kind of stories the world can learn from.”
Future projects that rDNA will embark on include working with the World Bank on training journalists in Fiscal Literacy in order to adequately tell Africa’s economic and development stories and training African reporters in Data Journalism.
The rDNA is funded by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, and partners with the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ). It is an initiative of Highway Africa
By Azwihangwisi Mufamadi
Picture by Lettie Ferreira