The EJC announces new winners and new deadline of the innovation in development reporting grant programme

The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is pleased to announce the winners of the second round of its Innovation in Development Reporting (IDR) Grant Programme.

{jcomments on}Twelve outstanding projects will be awarded a combined total of 225.541,00 Euros in funding to innovate global development narratives and bring to the public new forms of journalistic storytelling centered on the Millennium Development Goals. An advisory council of senior journalists oversaw the final decisions of the awards. The second round of the grant programme ran from 3 April until 5 September 2013 and received 242 applications.

 

The awarded projects have received endorsement from significant media outlets targeting audiences in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Funded topics will focus on issues such as: neglected tropical diseases, microcredits in the Democratic Republic of Congo, myths and misunderstandings about the Millennium Development Goals, investigation of large scale land-grabbing by multinationals in rural West Africa, child mortality in India, mobile money’s influence on development, sports’ and gender equality’s roles in development, biodiversity, and the reconstruction of Haiti.

The winning teams will employ multi-platform approaches, engage in cross-country media collaboration and make use of interactive applications, as well as investigative, data-driven and photo journalism. The projects will be released in the form of cross-platform storytelling that includes: TV and web documentaries, animated and interactive maps, multimedia and graphic features, mobile applications, and animated videos. Various social media tools will also be used extensively.

“With the very important on-going public dialogue around the Millennium Development Goals unfolding ahead of the 2015 target, the winning projects are very well-timed to put global development topics on the agenda of a wide public debate”, says EJC Director Wilfried Rütten.

The EJC will run two more rounds of applications in 2014. Don’t miss the next deadline coming up next year on the 26th of February 2014 (22:00 CET). Journalists and media organisations interested in breaking away from development journalism stereotypes can pitch their stories via the online application form. For questions, check the FAQ guide or send an email to info@journalismgrants.org.

 

The winners for this round are:

Project name: Beyond WHO’s List of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD)

Description: A radio series presents five neglected diseases/conditions beyond WHO’s NTD list: Antibiotic Resistances, Mental Illness, Nodding Syndrome, Traffic accidents, and Typhoid Fever.

Project locations: Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Madagascar, Geneva/Switzerland

Media outlet: Deutschlandfunk – “Forschung aktuell” (Germany)

Journalist(s): Franziska Badenschier

 

Project name: The State of Development: Myths & misunderstandings about the Millennium Development Goals

Description: A fact-checking investigation of the MDG results with use of open data.

Project locations: Videos: China, India, Ghana, Brazil, DRC, Sierra Leone

Media outlet(s): De Volkskrant, OneWorld (The Netherlands)

Journalist(s): Lonneke van Genugten

 

Project name: Building peace, one credit at a time

Description: A feature-length documentary and web-documentary investigation into the impact of microcredits in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Project locations: Democratic Republic of Congo

Media outlet(s): TV5Monde, Mediapart, L’Echo (France)

Journalist(s): Hervé Verloes, Pacom Bagula, Christian Katsuva; Bryan Carter, Nicolas Kayser-Bril

 

Project name: The dark side of Italian tomatoes

Description: A cross-platform web-doc on Italian tomatoes disrupting local markets in Africa.

Project locations: Italy, Ghana

Media outlet(s):   Le Monde diplomatique (France), Radio France Internationale (France), Internazionale (Italy), Al Jazeera English

Journalist(s): Stefano Liberti

 

Project name: Dirty Profits Exposed

Description: Investigation of large scale land-grabbing by multinationals in rural West Africa.

Project locations: Freetown, Malen Chiefdom, Bo, all Sierra Leone, and Monrovia, Bassa County, Margibi County, all Liberia

Media outlet(s):   Zeit Online (Germany)

Journalist(s): Victoria Schneider, Ilham Rawoot, Jonathan Wood

 

Project name: Fighting child mortality in India – and winning

Description: Could the answer to infant mortality be in a little village in rural India?

Project locations: Gadchiroli, Maharashtra State, India

Media outlet(s): El País (Spain)

Journalist(s): Jose Miguel  Calatayud

 

Project name: Can the money of the future make poverty an issue of the past?

Description: The overall aim of the project is to look at how mobile money is changing the ways individuals spend, save, trade and exchange. This project aims to make this topic accessible beyond the boundaries of the academic, business and development communities.

Project locations: Haiti, Burkina Faso, Somaliland, Nepal, Italy

Media outlet(s): The Guardian (UK), Il Fatto quotidiano (Italy)

Journalist(s): Marco Bello, Gianluca Iazzolino

 

Project name: Fuelling the war

Description: A multimedia data journalism analysis into why the war in Congo is more profitable than the peace.

Project locations: Democratic Republic of Congo

Media outlet(s): El Mundo (Spain)

Journalist(s): Alberto Rojas, Raquel Villaécija

 

Project name: Marathon to gender equality

Description: The project aims to explain how women in Kenya’s Iten, home of many of the best long distance runners in the world, are changing the socioeconomic landscape in the area through athletics. A comparison to the situation in Ethiopia will be undertaken.

Project locations: Nairobi and Iten (Kenya) and Addis Abeba (Ethiopia)

Media outlet(s): El Periódico (Spain)

Journalist(s): Javier Triana

 

Project name: Feeding the planet, cultivating diversity

Description: A digital story on global farmers and scientists working for biodiversity.

Project locations: Ethiopia (Tigray), Senegal (Thies), and Iran (Garmsar, Kermanshah)

Media outlet(s): Rai Radio3 (Italy), Wired (Italy), Le Figaro (France)

Journalist(s): Elisabetta Tola

 

Project name: Enough! – Women fighting violence and inequality together in new ways.

Description: From the Red Brigades to One Billion Rising to Holla Back! and the Everyday Sexism Project, such groups are popping up everywhere – in rural Kenya, urban Egypt and across Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, South Africa and elsewhere, as women band together to fight inequality, sexual harassment and violence using vigilantism, digital technology and even founding women’s only villages. How do they work and how effective are they at improving the lives of women? How are they impacting local communities, families, children, and other women around the world? How are they impacting policy?

Project locations: Kenya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, South Africa, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen.

Media outlet(s): Die Welt (Germany)

Journalist(s): Jennifer Collins

 

Project name: Rebuilding Haiti

Description: The project will design a web-based interactive story and game about Haiti’s rebuilding process where the user can take on different roles.

Project locations: Haiti, France

Media outlet(s): Rue89.com (France)

Journalist(s): Florent Maurin, Jean Abbiateci

The Innovation for Development Reporting Grant Programme was launched in January 2013 by the EJC with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project aims to reward quality journalism and advance a new and distinctive agenda for development coverage through awarding funding to a selection of state-of-the-art reporting projects of great impact and high visibility.

The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is a non-profit international foundation with the remit to improve, strengthen, and underpin journalism and the news media. This mission has two main aspects: On the one hand, it is about safeguarding, enhancing, and future-proofing quality journalism in Europe and on the other hand, it is about supporting initiatives towards press freedom in emerging and developing countries. This often includes creating the framework conditions for independent and self-determined journalism in the first place. To these ends, the EJC provides thematic training, professional capacity development, and a wide range of support activities for journalists.

 

Email: info@journalismgrants.org

Website: http://journalismgrants.org

Facebook: http://facebook.com/journalism.grants

Twitter: http://twitter.com/journagrants

Mailing list: http://journalismgrants.org/contact-us/