Sustainable Food Stories Fellowship! | Climate Tracker

We are looking for young journalists from Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia who want to write incredible stories about the production of food and access to sustainable diets in their home country. 

This will be a great opportunity for journalists to conduct important investigative reports and receive exclusive 4-weeks journalism training designed by Climate Tracker’s team. 

Through a unique partnership with HiVOS and IIED, we are now looking for amazing African journalists to join our training and receive funding to work on food stories in their countries. 

The chosen fellows will receive an investigative story grant to cover food issues back in their home country – all mentored by the Climate Tracker Team!

As a fellow, you will be required to attend and fully participate in the 4 weeks journalism course as well as submit all assignments and homework associated with the course. 

Upon your completion of the course you will then be asked to come up with a constructive pitch and work plan for a food story in your country. Climate Tracker will help you throughout this process. Once your pitch and work plan has been approved, you will enter an 8-weeks fellowship period where you will receive the grant and will have to work on your story. You will be required to update your Climate Tracker mentor with your progress on a weekly basis. 

As a fellow you are also expected to engage with other members in the team via our newly created Slack community, where Climate Tracker team will be sharing any useful information and stories. 

I'M IN! WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO?

It’s simple. You need to:

• Sign up on our Climate Tracker app to join the competition 
• Submit the following:
  • Your CV (upload it to any online drive and share the link)
  • Samples of your previous work (preferably related to sustainable diets and agriculture topics) 
  • A pitch for a food story idea in your country

Your food story idea can focus on key challenges and/or innovations/solutions on any of the following themes: 

• Food and nutrition security in the context of COVID-19

• The nexus of Climate Change and its impact on Agriculture 

• Agriculture and its Environmental footprint

• June 8th – 26th: Open call for applications. Make sure to submit by June 26th Midnight (GMT+3)
• June 29th: Shortlisted applicants are notified. 
• July 3rd – 31st: 4-weeks online journalism course 
•  August 3rd – September 28th: 8-weeks reporting fellowship 

What can I submit as work samples? 

Your work sample should be a piece (preferably related to the competition theme) published in local, national or international media outlets. Unfortunately, we can’t accept self-owned blog entities. 

Does it have to be a written publication? 

No! As long as you can send us a link or some evidence of your work in the media to highlight sustainable diets and food challenges, we’ll accept it. We love getting radio clips, PDFs of printed journalism, podcast links and TV snippets.

I don’t have a lot of experience in journalism, can you help me? 

Absolutely! We love to help passionate people build their writing and journalism skills. You can check out the toolkits that we have on our website here. You can also reach out to us directly at Lina@climatetracker.org 

Staff Writer

This article was written and edited by a staff writer.