Kenya: Inaugural Climate Change Competition Launched for Journalists

By Staff Writer

NAIROBI---A novel competition to build capacity and enable Kenyan journalists to cover environment and climate change issues has been launched.

The Climate  Change Adaptation, Mitigations and Innovations Media Award (C-CAMI Award launched in Nairobi Friday, is the  brainchild of Participatory  Ecological Landuse  Management  in Kenya (PELUM-Kenya),  a regional  network facilitating  learning, networking, advocacy in  East, Central and South Africa.   John Mututho, Chairman of Kenyan Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Cooperatives while officially launching the competition, praised the initiative that is intended to create better climate change coverage from grassroots to national levels.

According to Mututho, many journalists face capacity challenges in covering technical subjects like climate change and the competition will secure and offer journalists opportunity to sharpen their innovative and creative skills. He particularly challenged young and upcoming journalists to get involved in making decisions influencing them, saying that they should focus on climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.

He advocated for youths, particularly young women, who are often excluded from public debate, economic development, and decision-making processes to take their rightful place in the climate change debate. 

“Media plays every important   role in communicating climate change issues and  this annual competition, the fist of its kind in the region,  will  empower, capacity build  and enable  journalists offer  better  communications on environment and climate change,” said Mututho at the launching ceremony.

The competition seeks to understand and encourage ways and means in which journalists can engage ordinary citizens to achieve better socio-cultural and political outcomes. The competition is especially geared towards rural – based journalists since their daily interaction with farmers will have great impacts in the outcomes. The competition will be divided into various categories to be competed for by the journalists. The winners will be determined in December 2012 and the selection will be the journalists with the most coverage on media about best adaptations and mitigation innovations.

PELUM –Kenya country Coordinator Zachary Makanya said the competition, running for the next one year, will be divided into various categories including that catering for women journalist and e-media. He urged journalists to exploit diversity in communications tools and channels to create better climate change understanding, especially among the farmers who are the end users.

Makanya says the important role  journalists play in creating awareness and profiling issues related to climate change can not be taken for granted  and promised future training opportunities to  equip them with skills to progressively document, profile and share best practices from communities on how they are coping and mitigating to changing climate.

PELUM-Kenya is a membership network and part of the bigger PELUM-Association which covers Eastern, Central and South Africa in 10 countries. The membership currently in Kenya is 38 member organizations. PELUM-Kenya is active in promoting ecological land use and management and this makes climate change a key issue to all the activities of the network members and target beneficiaries; the small scale farmers.