Kenya’s NTV and the Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications have launched a weekly series of original half-hour documentaries Giving Nature a Voice, airing Wednesdays at 10PM from February 1, 2017.
Our goal: to give voice to the truly voiceless – East Africa’s threatened biosphere and the people who call it home. Thanks to the Aga Khan University’s Environmental Reporting Programme, a select group of young African filmmakers were given the opportunity to showcase their compelling, illuminating and impactful environmental films.
Under the AKU Environmental Challenge, launched last May, we invited filmmakers and broadcast journalists to explore East Africa’s most critical environmental issues. We asked them to look at efforts to protect the world’s largest population of mega-fauna, its threatened coral reefs and disappearing rainforests. Winning teams come from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi. Their projects explore a wide range of topics, from deforestation and the threats faced by Mother Africa’s greatest lakes — Victoria, Turkana, Naivasha and Tanganyika — from the cattle wars that pit pastoralists against each other and wildlife dependent on fragile rangelands, to the struggle by fishermen eking out a living when aquatic resources collapse from overfishing and habit destruction, to the alarming rate at which our imperiled biodiversity is vanishing.
These are stories of immense human drama set amid profound climate and environmental change. Yet they also reflect the new optimism of an emerging environmental consciousness – and activism – in Kenya and elsewhere in East Africa. Filmmakers will profile the effort to teach Kenya’s youngest generations to value and protect their most valuable inheritance and the stunning beauty of our common African home. Others will give voice not only to nature but the people who live on the edge of the wild, and whose lives are most dependent on its preservation.
All the filmmakers have answered our challenge to produce “smart, ambitious and innovative documentaries that will shape debate, move governments to action and help save our natural heritage.” In January 2017, we announced Round 2 of our Environmental Challenge, offering funding for another set of pioneering reports from the front-lines of our threatened natural world. Our aim: to draw on the unrivalled power of an informed media – to raise awareness, support the new wave of environmental consciousness sweeping Kenya and the region. Together with like-minded allies and an engaged public, we can change a dangerous trajectory that otherwise would be unstoppable.