New podcast for the Tällberg Foundation, recorded in Nairobi

In Nairobi, when meetings were still possible as COVID19 had not reached Kenya yet, I recorded a podcast for the Tällberg Foundation. Anne Goldfeld, Faustin Linyekula, and Saul Griffith shared their ideas on the future and their relationship with it. All three received the Tällberg/Eliasson Global Leadership Prize in 2019. In the podcast, all winners discover how their respective expertise – medicine, dance, and fighting climate change – are all fueled by “the mystery of the unknown” and their desire to explore it.

Click ‘play’ in the player above to listen to the podcast.

Our Grit & Grass production is on display in Hannover

Our Grit & Grass multimedia production about a climate change-induced conflict between herders and farmers in Nigeria has been selected for the 7th edition of the Hannover-based visual journalism festival called ‘Lumix Festival for Young Visual Journalism’. From the 18th until the 29th of June, our production was on display, both offline and online. You can still see our production as a part of the festival’s program.

‘Ultraslut’, a production by Helena Lea Manhartsberger and Katharina Neuhaus, has won the first prize in the Storytelling awards. Our story is still on display on the digital exhibition space that the Lumix Festival has created. To see all the 18 selected Storytelling specialists, click here.

We're a 'Digital Storytelling' finalist at the LUMIX Festival

In the 7th edition for the LUMIX Festival for Young Visual Journalism, our ‘Grit & Grass’ multimedia story is selected as one of this year’s finalists in the ‘Digital Storytelling’ category. Together with ‘ digital narrative format’ productions made by renowned photographers and journalists like Cicilie S. Andersen, Anna Fritsche, Ilvy Njiokiktjien and Etinosa Yvonne, our work can be seen during the festival in Hanover. Due to COVID19 measures, however, the festival will run mainly online.

Grit & Grass was produced on assignment by Dutch foreign news platform Bureau Buitenland. For this story about a deadly conflict between herdsmen and farmers in Nigeria, Africa correspondent Saskia Houttuin and I traveled to Plateau State, where we created two interactive stories which focus on both sides of the conflict.

The first chapter of this story is about Nding, where Fidelis tells about the Fulani herdsmen that attacked his family. The second chapter is about a nearby settlement of Fulani herders, who explain why they had to move their cattle into farmers territory - one of the biggest reasons that initiated this conflict is drought caused by climate change.

This multimedia interactive story is made with the Slices storytelling tool, and includes photography, video, text and infographics. You can watch both (Dutch) chapters of the story in the video below, or click through the English two chapters through these links:

• Grit & Grass 1: the farmers

• Grit & Grass 2: the herdsmen

VPRO Bureau Buitenland multimedia project: 'Grit & Grass'

If Nigeria is mentioned in Dutch media, chances are high that the news story is about Boko Haram. But just a couple of hundreds kilometers from where the Boko Haram insurgency is taking place, thousands of Nigerians have been killed in a lesser known conflict between herdsmen and farmers.

For Dutch broadcaster VPRO’s Bureau Buitenland platform, Saskia Houttuin and I traveled to Plateau State, where we created two interactive stories which focus on both sides of the conflict. The first story is about Nding, where Fidelis tells about the Fulani herdsmen that attacked his family. The second chapter is about a nearby settlement of Fulani herders, who explain why they had to move their cattle into famers territory - one of the biggest reasons is drought caused by climate change.

This multimedia interactive story is made with the Slices storytelling tool, and includes photography, video, text and infographics. You can watch both (Dutch) chapters of the story in the video below, or click through the English two chapters through these links:

• Grit & Grass 1: the farmers

• Grit & Grass 2: the herdsmen

In July 2020, the production was a finalist in the 7th edition for the LUMIX Festival for Young Visual Journalism, in the ‘Digital Storytelling’ category. Read more about the festival here.

To watch more multimedia stories about climate refugees, you can take a look at this VPRO Bureau Buitenland web page.

Rising sea levels in Mombasa: a story for Samsam

For Dutch newspaper / magazine Samsam, I met up with Swabir, a 12 year old boy who lives in the Kenyan city of Mombasa. His father is Head of Education at the renowned Fort Jesus, the number one cultural attraction of Kenya’s coastal area. But the fort has seen better days: due to coastal erosion, rising sea levels and erosion caused by rain water (all linked to climate change), the centuries old structure is deteriorating rapidly.

Together with Raphael Igombo and his son Swabir, I visited the fort to have a look at the recently constructed wall that should protect Fort Jesus for the next hundred years. You can read the story in the current edition of Samsam, online on their website or you can click on the image below to enlarge the article. Samsam is a magazine and learning method, which is distributed to and used by primary schools all over The Netherlands.

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