Malawi’s Daily Water Struggle:
In a new report for CCIJ, journalist Winston Mwale explains why Malawians are still fighting over water after 56 years of being an independent nation. Mwale wrote that less than 10% of Malawi’s 17.5 million residents had access to piped water in their homes in 2018. This forces families to buy water from kiosks. Those kiosks are often left unattended, meaning those collecting water–often women–are flocking to shallow wells or rivers for their daily water needs.
Covid-19 has shed light on this problem, although many communities in Malawi have dealt with this their entire lives. Disease is rampant because of unsanitary water, disproportionately impacting the poorest Malawians.
Waterless
Mwale is this week’s Waterless guest. A CCIJ member and the founder and editor of Africa Brief, a news aggregator for stories about Africa, Mwale has years of experience across east and southern Africa– and beyond. He has racked up cross-continental bylines and regional awards on this journey. He specializes in investigative and solutions journalism. In this episode, Mwale discusses his work as a journalist and his new story with host Ruona Meyer.
Read Mwale’s work with CCIJ:
Transparency Talks:
On this week’s episode of Transparency Talks, Jeff talks with Khaled Sulaiman, a Kurdish journalist with an expertise in water and climate change in Iraq. Sulaiman talks about why he tries to humanize his stories and how he draws on his experiences to do so.
Read Sulaiman’s work with CCIJ:
Water Disease in Africa:
In a blog post for CCIJ this week, social media intern Abigail Goldberg-Zelizer spoke with two African journalists, Wendy Muperi an Adie Vanessa Offiong, about their experiences reporting on water disease in Zimbabwe and Nigeria, respectively. Reporting on water disease requires deep investigation into struggling communities, government accountability and distribution of resources. On a daily basis, Muperi and Offiong have to overcome the challenges of being young, female journalists operating in underfunded media industries, to tell some of the most urgent stories.
In Other News:
Other news from CCIJ members and partner organizations
- A civil society group has withdrawn their court action against CCIJ Southern Africa Hub Leader Raymond Joseph and his team at GroundUp.
“If (United Civil Society in Action) UCSA had been successful, we would have had to remove articles that have exposed corruption, incompetence and conflicts of interest by NLC employees and grant recipients.” –GroundUp Staff
Read the whole piece here.