Pulitzer Center Update November 4, 2024
Journalists Bring Nile River Basin Reporting to U.S. Classrooms
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“What you and I, sitting here next to one another, can […] think about is the way that conflict and environments are fused,” said Ann Neumann, Pulitzer Center grantee and author of The Good Death.
Neumann joined Fredrick Mugira, Pulitzer Center grantee and founder of Water Journalists Africa, for classroom visits in Atlanta, Georgia, and Austin, Texas. Together, they reached nearly 270 students across Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium partners Spelman College and Huston-Tillotson University, as well as three K-12 schools. Morrow High School, outside of Atlanta, recorded a portion of the journalists' presentation.
Mugira and Neumann visited Spelman College during Homecoming Week. They attended sociology and writing classes, and held a discussion moderated by Spelman’s 2024 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow, Montsho Canton. At Huston-Tillotson University, they presented their work to a group of 60 students and advised students on how to write a strong pitch to apply for the Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellowship.
Mugira, who is based in Kampala, Uganda, and Neumann, who is based in New York City, reported with Pulitzer Center support in the Nile River Basin. The Basin is a region of 3.18 million square kilometers that includes 11 countries, from Uganda to Egypt. The Nile flows south to north, snaking deep into the continent by way of the White Nile. The Blue Nile, which draws from Late Tana in Ethiopia, provides the river with 85% of its water volume. The Nile is a “hotspot for biodiversity,” said Mugira, as well as geopolitical tension. Moneyed international interests only complicate matters.
In his Pulitzer Center-supported project Sucked Dry, Mugira describes the Nile as “not only a source of livelihood, but also a cultural icon that flows with thousands of years of history, beliefs, and tradition in its waters.”
Sucked Dry is an expansive, cross-border geo-journalism investigation that examines foreign agricultural investments along the Nile River. Companies from Europe, the Middle East, and the United States buy land not for acreage, but for access to water. They displace subsistence farmers in Uganda, employ exploitative labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and ship thirsty crops like alfalfa back to their home countries. Local governments often make willing partners.
“We have forced [some] governments to put in place new laws that would favor communities,” said Mugira.
Widespread conflict in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as geopolitical competition, however, make coordinated, cross-border solutions challenging.
“Egypt views the Nile River as a critical resource, central to its water supply and agricultural needs,” said Mugira.
When Americans think of the Nile, Neumann noted, they think of Egypt.
Led by authoritarian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the country often cites colonial-era entitlements. Young and brash, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has accelerated a concrete counterclaim to the region’s lifeline: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Ethiopia, a largely Christian nation, receives the third-most of any country in U.S. aid.
“From the Ethiopian point of view, a modern dam is what will make their country a modern state,” explained Neumann in her Pulitzer Center-supported article “Hydropower,” published in the Baffler.
Egypt, meanwhile, has long-delayed prospecting for new water sources and conservation strategies in the face of overpopulation. Most of the habitable territory in Egypt is within a few miles of the Nile, which widens into a mouth at the Delta. Any change in the flow from the Blue Nile could have devastating consequences to downstream populations and biodiversity. According to Neumann, El-Sisi advances racist stereotypes about Ethiopians to rally his political base instead of pursuing meaningful policy or infrastructure changes.
With Ethiopia’s regional ambitions at stake, civil conflict ravaged the state of Tigray, a long-contested region in the north of the country, from 2020 to 2022. Both the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and the Ethiopian government committed gross human rights violations, according to Neumann. Her most-recent Pulitzer Center-supported project, My Fixer, examines the production of western media abroad, and dangers that fall disproportionately on local reporting partners in politically-fraught environments.
Even if it does complete and operate the dam at near-full capacity, questions remain about whether Ethiopia will be able to convey the electricity it generates to the nearly 70% of the country without it.
“I wanted to ask questions about the United States as an empire,” said Neumann, whose father served at an American counterintelligence site in what is now Eritrea. “I have an American readership who has no idea where [Ethiopia and] Eritrea is, who don’t know where the horn of Africa is."
“A story that takes months and thousands of dollars to report cannot happen today without organizations like the Pulitzer Center,” Neumann said.
Mugira agreed. In addition to editorial and financial support, the Pulitzer Center brings journalists like Mugira and Neumann into classrooms where they speak to students about their work as journalists.
Mugira’s nonprofit media organization, Water Journalists Africa, shares the Pulitzer Center’s commitment to education and training.
“Those who are trained are the ones who go and train others,” he explained. He connects nearly 1,600 journalists across several initiatives like InfoNile and the Apes Reporting Project. They work in Amharic, Arabic, Kiswahili, French, and English.
A student from Huston-Tillotson University said they learned how “governments play a role in allowing outside interests to come in and deplete and appropriate land […].”
Another student from Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy said, “I learned about the ape protection and the Nile river. I also learned how [journalists] get their information and what they have to go through to get [it].”
Cleopatra Warren, an educator at Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy, said: “The insights and presentations from Ann and Frederick were incredibly valuable to our students and staff, especially as they relate to our ongoing efforts in education.”
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