EJN Journalist Fellowship for Infrastructure Reporting in Lower Mekong 2024 | APPLY NOW

This informs the public about the EJN Journalist Fellowship for Infrastructure Reporting in Lower Mekong 2024. Details about the Program are given below.

EJN Journalist Fellowship for Infrastructure Reporting in Lower Mekong

About EJN Journalist Fellowship for Infrastructure Reporting in Lower Mekong 2024

Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) has launched a Journalist Fellowship for Infrastructure Reporting in Lower Mekong to equip mid-career journalists with training, mentoring, and story grants to report on infrastructural development and its impacts on the environment and human rights. Participating journalists will also learn measures and strategies to mitigate potential physical and digital risks both they and the communities involved may face when reporting on this theme.

Via a hybrid workshop (10 hours online and two days in-person) in March 2024 and subsequent story grants, the fellowship aims to strengthen journalists’ knowledge and skills to produce engaging and impactful stories on infrastructural development while ensuring a Do No Harm approach when engaging and reporting on individuals and communities.

Program Details

Southeast Asia (SEA) is set to become the world’s fourth largest economy by 2030. To sustain economic growth, the Asian Development Bank estimates that the region needs to invest $60 billion per year upgrading its infrastructure and many SEA countries plan to rapidly expand investments.

Many of the resulting infrastructure projects, such as the high-speed rail connecting Laos and China and hydropower dam near Luang Prabang, promise strong economic growth. However, this push for infrastructure development has exacerbated existing environmental issues such as unchecked urban sprawl and severe environmental degradation. For example, the Xayaburi Dam in Thailand has changed water and sediment flows, and as a result farmers have seen their farmland disappear underneath the changing Mekong River. Vietnam’s Mekong Delta also faces severe degradation due to huge demands for sand used in infrastructure development. Further, this rush to expand infrastructure puts the rights of marginalized groups (including women, children/youth, indigenous populations, migrants, rural populations, etc.) at high risk as they often depend on natural resources for their livelihoods and/or are more vulnerable to the pollution that may result from these projects.

Eligibility

Participants can be from Thailand, Laos PDR, Myanmar, Cambodia, or Vietnam. We especially encourage early- and mid-career journalists, as well as women and Indigenous journalists, to apply.

Applicants must:

  • Commit to attending all days of both the online and in-person workshops.
  • Have at least two years of experience reporting on infrastructure and/or environmental topics in any medium (online, print, television, radio) from all types of media organizations – international, national, local and community-based.
  • Understand and be able to communicate in English. For the purposes of this training opportunity, we will only be accepting applications in English. Unfortunately, we do not have the capacity to consider applications in other languages at this time. Applicants must either have a working understanding of English or have a translator available to assist with communication with Internews staff.
  • Permit republication by EJN of any output as a result of participation in the fellowship.

Applicants are required to be transparent about the use of generative AI tools, if any, in the development of their proposals.

EJN reserves the right to disqualify applicants from consideration if they have been found to have engaged in unethical or improper professional conduct, including, but not limited to, plagiarism and/or submitting AI-generated content as their own.

Application

  • Click the ‘Apply now’ button at the top of the page.
  • If you don’t have an account, you must register by clicking “Log in” on the top right of the page and click the “Sign up” link at the bottom of the page that opens. Click here for detailed instructions on how to create an account, and here for detailed instructions on how to reset your password.
  • If you start the application and want to come back and complete it later, you can click ‘Save Draft.’ To return to the draft, you’ll need to go back to the opportunity and click ‘Apply now’ again to finalize the application.

If you encounter difficulties with submitting your application or have questions, please email info.ejn@internews.org. Do not contact any other Internews email regarding this opportunity, as we will not receive it.     

Applications submitted after the deadline will not be considered.   

Application Deadline

  • The deadline for receipt of applications is 31 January 2024.

Open this link for more details about EJN Journalist Fellowship for Infrastructure Reporting in Lower Mekong 2024.

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