Africa: Covering Climate Change - a Life-changing Experience of Learning for African Journalists

9 December 2011
allAfrica.com
blog By Gifti Nadi

Durban — After traveling through Africa to Durban to cover the UN climate change conference, described by many of the African journalists as "life-changing", an exchange between the African and local South African journalists at a COP17 side event turned out to be beneficial to both groups. Eight journalists from the UNDP's Africa Adaptation Programme Media Capacity Development group and four AllAfrica.com interns shared experiences, advice on covering climate change, and personal highlights of the past few weeks of focus on climate change.


It was very timely for the journalists who travelled to Durban in the Caravan to have a forum where they could narrate their experience from the beginning with pictures, audio, video and anecdotes. It was also the first time our senior journalists were able to hear about the Caravan experience in detail.  The group is now dispersing so this was indeed a very important and heartwarming event for everyone involved.


Melissa Britz, an allAfrica staff member who is a recent Rhodes Journalism School graduate in Media Management, did a great job moderating. In between each presentation by the Caravan journalists, we had one of the senior journalists give their perspectives on their role in Durban, as seasoned journalists and Africans concerned about these important development issues.

The AllAfrica.com interns from Durban were a bit overawed by the newfound confidence of their Africa-wide counterparts so they took full advantage of meeting with the group after the presentation. They questions about journalism, traveling throughout Africa and covering the COP 17 conference. All in all, this was a great mentoring opportunity  from our 3 senior journalists to Caravan journalists who also spent a good 30 minutes after the event mentoring the interns. All in all – one of the more interesting events of this whole COP 17 experience for me, and very much appreciated by our whole group.

We are pleased about the allAfrica.com coverage of this event, with personal blogs by the interns. In addition, a journalist from Highway Africa at Rhodes University was there to cover the event – saying he couldn't resist "gatecrashing" this important function. Another journalist was intrigued by our event and decided to cover it for the South African Broadcasting Corporation, so Augustina Armstrong-Obonna, a reporter for Radio Nigeria in Lagos, gave a fantastic interview on behalf of the AAP group. Her description of her experiences in her own words captured the feedback we have had on addressing the root issues of poverty and development when talking about Climate Change.

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