Projects from ten journalism schools across Africa have been awarded grants under a UNESCO initiative aimed at enhancing journalism education across the continent. The selected projects will be implemented in all five sub-regions of Africa: Northern, Central, Southern, Western and Eastern Africa.
This outcome follows a call for proposals in June that invited universities to suggest innovative ways to strengthen their journalism programmes, aligning with a pre-established criteria for excellence developed in collaboration with journalism educators.
The selected proposals address a diverse array of topics and challenges. These included strengthening gender-sensitive reporting in post-conflict societies, mainstreaming gender perspectives in curricula and internal institutional processes, reinforcing environmental journalism, building data journalism capacity, developing a sustainability model in collaboration with community radio for instructional purposes, working with marginalised and indigenous communities to strengthen the representation of these communities in the media and university curricula, and building digital skills through a new online platform.
The process was highly competitive, attracting 53 submissions from 23 countries.
Each of the following institutions has been granted USD15,500:
- Department of Communication at Université de Douala (Cameroon)
- Department of Journalism from Université Bilingue du Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
- Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of Eswatini (Eswatini)
- Department of Journalism and Communications, Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia)
- Department of Journalism at the University of Media, Arts and Communication – Ghana Institute of Journalism (Ghana)
- Institute of Social Communication at Tangaza University College (Kenya)
- Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (Malawi)
- Institut Supérieur de l’Information et de la Communication (Morocco)
- Department of Journalism and Media Technology at Namibia University of Science and Technology (Namibia)
- fraycollege (South Africa)
The schools will implement their projects until March 2024. Over 100 journalism educators from across Africa contributed to the development of the set of the criteria for excellence which applicants used to evaluate their current teaching programmes. The project proposals were then developed based on the identified gaps. An abridged version of these criteria will be included in the project’s 2024 outputs.
This project is an initiative of UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication and is coordinated by Wits University and Rhodes University (South Africa). It is supported by the Google News Initiative.
For more on the UNESCO project on excellence in journalism education, please visit: Excellence in Journalism Education in Africa | UNESCO
