By Fredrick Mugira
Vincent Ayebare has spent more than a decade operating a boda boda—a commercial motorcycle taxi—in Mbarara City, Uganda. Every day, he is stationed right outside one of the city’s busiest media houses.
During dry seasons, Ayebare rides to the nearby River Rwizi, loads his motorcycle with yellow jerrycans filled with water, and ferries them to some households in the city. Over the years, this routine has made him a living repository of the river’s changing rhythms. He knows when the levels drop, when the colour changes, when the river refills again.
His knowledge is irreplaceable—the kind no satellite image or government report can replicate. Yet no journalist has ever sought his perspective. “They tell stories that concern us but never involve us,” Ayebare says, stressing that, “they (journalists) prefer big people.”
His experience points to a pattern. African environmental journalism has anchored itself to elite voices — diplomats, officials, corporates— far from the streets, shores, and farms where the consequences land.
Deliberate Production of Ignorance
The problem runs deeper than lazy journalism or tight budgets. Research suggests these failures are structural.They are built into the media systems and reporting habits of African newsrooms.
Something deeper is also at play: agnotology — the deliberate production of ignorance. The concept, coined by historian Robert Proctor, was originally applied to the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to manufacture doubt about the health risks of smoking. Environmental journalism is no exception.
In today’s media landscape, the crisis is no longer simply a lack of facts. It is the deliberate creation of silence—an engineered political tool designed to ensure that certain communities never fully understand the systems shaping their lives. For example: if a community is kept ignorant of the fact that water access is a human right, they may welcome the installation of a borehole before an election as a gift—rather than the belated fulfillment of a basic state obligation.
Some elites, manufacture such ignorance, to benefit from a compliant population that lacks the awareness to challenge the status quo. Studies show that African corporations exploit the same manufactured ignorance to pass off greenwashing as genuine sustainability.
And whether intentionally or not, when the media systematically prioritises elite voices, it becomes an instrument of that manufacture. This is not about blaming journalists. Many are doing their best under several constraints. But the result is the same: a press that, through habit and omission, protects the very ignorance it should be dismantling.
Efficiency Trap
Why does mainstream media keep looking up instead of down? The answer lies partly in the economic realities of modern newsrooms— and partly in the habits those pressures have created.
“Journalism from the front lines of climate change across low and middle income countries fulfils an essential role,” says Ben Deighton, President of the World Federation of Science Journalists. Yet the industry has been drained by social media platforms that have swallowed most advertising revenue. “Without support,” he warns, “we have no hope of stopping climate change.”
These pressures are not unique to any single newsroom — they define the landscape of environmental journalism across the continent. The implication is that the stories most essential to public survival are the ones the industry has made structurally impossible to tell.
This financial starvation produces an efficiency trap. Newsrooms, under constant pressure to chase speed and clicks, trade depth for convenience. For example, several newsrooms find it faster and cheaper to quote an official with a press release than to send a reporter into a rural community.
Diana Taremwa Karakire, investigative environmental journalist and founder of Indigenous Times Media, challenges this assumption directly. She says, “it is actually easier to quote a farmer because I have reliable grassroots sources”. The real barrier, she suggests, is not access — it is habit.
But Karakire points to something else too: discomfort. Talking to local sources is not a quick phone call. People in these communities are sometimes in crisis — fighting land grabbers, struggling to pay school fees, going hungry. “They do not only want to be interviewed. They want help,” she says. That is not a transaction. It is a relationship. And many journalists, trained to stay detached, would rather not go there.
The result is a loop. The same voices get quoted. The same stories get told. And eventually, everyone mistakes the habit for the facts.
Reclaiming Lived Knowledge
Breaking this cycle means more than adding new faces to the same old story. It means deciding, from scratch, who gets to be an expert.
The industry still has a long way to go, according to David Akana, Director of Programs at Mongabay Africa. He says NGOs, scientists and experts continue to dominate environmental coverage aided by language, access, and polished communication strategies. Meaningfully including Indigenous peoples and local communities, he says, still requires extra effort that most newsrooms are unwilling to make.
At Mongabay Africa, that effort is built into the model. “Our reporting is rooted in frontier communities and direct engagement with Indigenous and local populations,” Akana explains. But he is clear that Mongabay is the exception, not the rule.
In mainstream media, the pressure for speed and clicks means too much gets sacrificed. “If we are wondering why decades of climate and biodiversity reporting have not translated into stronger public action,” he says, “part of the answer lies in how these stories are covered.” Too often, he argues, reporting fails to connect the issues to people’s everyday lives — and without that connection, audiences cannot fully identify with the crisis, let alone act on it.
The cost of exclusion is clear, says Joydeep Gupta, South Asia Director for the Earth Journalism Network. Local communities are, in his words, “the people who actually depend on natural resources for their lives and livelihoods”. When journalists bypass them, something irreplaceable disappears — knowledge built over generations, the kind that notices a river shrinking or a season shifting long before any instrument does. “Highlighting marginalised voices,” he says, “is a crucial tool to expose and address that imbalance.”
That exclusion is not accidental — it is systemic, argues Eman Mounir, an award-winning Egyptian environmental journalist. Policies on water, dams, and irrigation are shaped by technocratic priorities, and media coverage follows the same logic. Decision-makers dominate the narrative while those living on the margins are treated as passive victims. “This imbalance turns journalism into an echo chamber of power,” she argues, “amplifying institutions instead of interrogating them.” But the fix, she insists, goes beyond adding more voices. “Shifting journalism from extraction to collaboration — reporting with communities rather than just about them — is what redefines environmental justice,” contends Mounir.
For Andrew Aijuka, a media manager at InfoNile, a story is not finished when it is published — it is finished when it goes home. “At InfoNile, we take stories — in the form of articles, radio pieces, and video documentaries — back to communities after the journalists we have granted publish them,” he explains. The practice does something publication alone cannot: it builds trust. When a community sees its own experience accurately reflected and returned to it, the transactional relationship between journalist and source shifts into something more durable — and more productive. “Some local people do not trust journalists — that is why they keep away,” Aijuka notes. Closing that loop, he believes, is one of the most practical tools available for dismantling that distrust, opening communities up to journalists, and generating the follow-up stories that sustain long-term accountability.
When Crisis Meets Vulnerability
Inclusive environmental reporting cannot stop at including local communities as a generic category. Dev Datta Joshi, a human rights lawyer and Executive Director of Equip for Equality Nepal, knows exactly what is missing. “Media cannot tell the full truth if it continues to exclude marginalised voices,” he says — and for Joshi, that includes persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, women, and rural communities. His call goes beyond token representation. Newsrooms, he argues, must treat these communities not as victims to be pitied but as experts to be quoted. “Climate justice and social justice are deeply connected,” he says. According to Joshi, when the media amplifies diverse perspectives, it strengthens public understanding and accountability.
Some communities carry more than one crisis at a time. Adella Mbabazi, Communications and Advocacy Officer at the International Community of Women Living with HIV Eastern Africa, narrates that women and girls living with HIV — especially in rural and low-income communities — are among the hardest hit by climate shocks.
For them, food insecurity, disrupted healthcare, displacement, and gender-based violence arrive together — yet their voices rarely make it into coverage. “Representation matters not only in whose stories are told,” she says, “but also in who gets quoted, photographed, and included in decision-making conversations”. Mbabazi, wants media houses to always partner with grassroots women-led organisations, use language that does not stigmatise, and report on solutions — not just suffering.
The Path Forward
Good intentions are not enough. Real change means restructuring how newsrooms hire, train, and fund their work — not just running diversity workshops. Senakpon Gerard Guedegbe, Chairman of the African Initiative for Communication and Freedom of Expression in Ivory Coast, says the transformation has to be built into institutions. “Media programming needs to be systematically upgraded to develop deeper environmental content and support in-house mentoring for journalists,” notes Senakpon. He also calls for investment in local-language translation tools to lower the barriers to reporting from isolated communities, and for cross-border collaboration to hold powerful actors accountable where single newsrooms cannot reach.
But perhaps the most important structural shift is the simplest and the hardest: staying. Fiona Macleod, Executive Director of Oxpeckers Center for Investigative Environmental Journalism, identifies sustained presence as the defining difference between journalism that delivers impact and journalism that merely performs inclusion. “We consistently place affected communities and marginalised groups at the forefront of our work,” says Macleod. That commitment, she insists, is costly — but it is also what makes the difference. “These rigorous follow-ups take time and resources, but they are what deliver real, tangible impact.”
Vincent Ayebare still operates outside the media house in Mbarara every day. The journalists still walk past. The river is still changing. The story is still being missed. The question is no longer whether journalism has failed communities like his. It has. The question is whether the profession has the structural will—and the moral urgency—to change.
Fredrick Mugira is an AFSEE fellow at London School of Economics and political science (LSE).
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Media Diversity Institute. Any questions or comments should be addressed to the editor at [email protected] of the Media Diversity Institute (MDI).
