Six African newsrooms have been selected to participate in the first edition of the Africa Climate Beacons Newsroom Initiative, a programme designed to strengthen climate journalism and encourage more coverage focused on responses to the impacts of climate change.

Nairobi, Kenya, September 11, 2026

The initiative is led by Media for Environment, Science, Health and Agriculture (MESHA) in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). It will bring together media organisations from five African countries for seven months, from September 2026 to March 2027.

The six selected newsrooms are Radio Africa Group in Kenya; Water Journalists Africa and Media Challenge Initiative in Uganda; Social Voices in Nigeria; Habitat Media in Tanzania; and Zodiak Broadcasting Station in Malawi.

According to MESHA, they were selected from 133 applications.

From documenting impacts to examining responses

The programme is based on a growing reality: across many parts of Africa, climate change is already affecting livelihoods, agriculture, access to water, health and ecosystems.

For the organisers, however, documenting the damage alone is not enough.

The initiative aims to help journalists go further by investigating responses developed by communities, institutions and organisations, while examining the evidence behind claims about their results.

“Climate change is not only a story of what is going wrong. It is also a story of what is being done, what works and what can be learned,” said Nduta Waweru, MESHA vice-president, according to the organisation’s statement.

This approach requires journalists to verify reported results, identify the limitations of proposed solutions and examine the conditions under which they could be replicated.

Eight in-depth climate stories per newsroom

During the programme, participating newsrooms will receive training in solutions journalism, regular mentoring and support from climate and solutions journalism specialists.

The training will also cover audience and community engagement, as well as ways of tracking the impact of journalistic work.

Each newsroom will develop a work plan outlining its reporting series and publication schedule.

They will then be expected to produce at least eight in-depth stories on climate solutions, using different formats, including print, digital, radio, television, multimedia and podcasts.

The newsrooms will also be required to measure the reach and impact of their productions.

Different climate realities, a shared challenge

For MESHA, the diversity of the six participating newsrooms is one of the strengths of the initiative.

The selected media organisations serve different audiences and operate across a range of platforms. Yet they cover communities experiencing different manifestations of the same broader climate challenge.

Droughts, floods, land degradation, pressure on water resources, agricultural losses and ecosystem changes can have highly localised consequences while crossing national borders.

The programme therefore seeks to encourage exchanges among journalists and newsrooms, allowing experiences developed in one country to inform reporting elsewhere.

Making climate journalism a tool for understanding

According to Aghan Daniel, MESHA’s director general, the initiative is intended to strengthen newsrooms’ ability to explain how climate change is affecting communities and to examine responses using data and evidence.

The organisation also aims to improve journalists’ scientific and climate literacy and strengthen their ability to tell stories that help audiences understand the changes taking place in their communities.

MESHA president Bozo Jenje describes the initiative as more than a one-off training programme. In his view, it should help media professionals turn local data and experiences into stories that are useful to communities.

By the end of the seven-month programme, MESHA and SJN aim to have developed a network of newsrooms capable of producing climate journalism that is more rigorous, rooted in local realities and more closely connected to community experiences.

The central test, however, will be whether the solutions documented in these stories stand up to scrutiny: What actually works, for whom, under what conditions and with what results?

Those are precisely the questions that solutions-focused climate journalism seeks to investigate.