INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM IN THE NATURAL RESOURCE SECTOR
Announcement in Brief
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Programme Rationale
According to the United Nations, Africa is home to about 30 per cent of the world’s natural resources, a good proportion of which resides in the West Africa sub-region. For many years, countries in the West Africa sub-region have harnessed natural resources such as oil, gold, cotton, bauxite and many others. However, the abundance of these resources and their continued exploitation have not yielded expected development in the sub-region. Several factors, including bad leadership, corruption, lack of technical know-how, colonial ties among others, have been identified for this underdevelopment amidst wealth.
Viewing this problem from another - but equally important - spectrum, it is evident that the myriads of environmental challenges the region currently faces are as a result of unsustainable, largely illegal, practices deployed in harnessing natural resources. For instance, countries like Mauritania, Senegal,
The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone lose about US$2.3 billion annually to illegal fishing; over 540,000 tons of rosewood have been illegally harvested and exported in Ghana since the past 10 years, among just a few examples.
Objectives
The overall objective of the module is to enhance the capacity and investigation techniques of journalists and other actors particularly interested and/or specialized in governance issues especially in the extractive sector in West Africa.
Other specific objectives include:
- Provide paricipants with a detailed understanding of the West Africa natural resources ecosystem.
- Organize and support the creaion of a synergy of acion between actors so that they work in consorium and be able to carry out naional and transnaional invesigaions.
- Enhance capaciies to assess, monitor and evaluate acions and policies implemented by governments in the governance of natural resources, paricularly extracive industries.
- Increase qualitaively and quanitaively producions on the natural resources sector;
- Help paricipants in sourcing invesigaive story ideas and moivate them in delivery.
