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Ten memos on collaboration between journalists and researchers in the Nile basin

In June we organised a workshop in Cairo to kick off the second round of co-production fellowships, pairing journalists and researchers from Nile countries to work together at water science communication projects. This innovative fellowship has been inspired by several years of collaborations between journalists and researchers in the Nile basin. Here’s what we have learnt so far.

Credits: InfoNile

In the past years, with InfoNile, SciDev.net, and the Nile Basin Capacity Building Network, we have been working on several projects to promote collaborations between journalists and researchers, reflecting on the role that they can play in water diplomacy in the Nile basin. One of our latest projects, Nile Well, supported by the Water and Development Partnership Program funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, offers a fellowship for journalists and researchers to get trained in science communication and co-produce original stories based on ongoing water research in the Nile basin. A first round of fellows is about to complete their work, while the second one was invited in June in Cairo for the kick-off workshop of their program. In one of the sessions, I shared with the fellows ten lessons that we have learned so far about collaborations between journalists and researchers in the Nile basin. Here you are!

1. What unites us is more important than what divides us

At the beginning of our first project – Open Water Diplomacy – to get to know each other and find a way to work together, we highlighted the differences between journalists and researchers, in terms of time, style, audiences, focus, and depth. Indeed, these differences are there and persist. However, later we realised that to find common ground and promote collaboration we also need to emphasise what unites the two professions, in terms of values and approaches. For instance, both journalists and researchers aim at offering to their audiences a representation of reality. And both strive for originality in such representation.

2. Caring for data and sources

To offer an original and valid representation of reality, data and sources are key. Both journalism and research are based on getting access to reliable and meaningful data, information, and sources. These could be in the form of numbers, people, or tools for data collection. Accessing reliable data and sources can be challenging, particularly in the context of a highly securitized river like the Nile, where data and numbers are quintessentially political. Collecting data and information, critically analysing them by acknowledging their limits and partiality, caring for and protecting our sources: these operations can be an effective way to build collaborations between journalists and researchers. We experienced it at the workshop in Cairo, during the session on data visualisation, that showed how journalists’ and researchers’ competences are complementary to produce well informed and nicely designed data journalism.

3. Joint training facilitates mutual understanding and relations building

Initially, in our activities we planned for and organised separate pieces of training for the two groups. Researchers were trained in science communication skills, while journalists got courses on water issues like water diplomacy or water management. Later we explored the format of joint training, with journalists and researchers sitting in the same room, attending the same lectures, learning from each other, with hands-on activities and workshops to practice collaboration. We found this innovative practice quite effective in promoting mutual understanding and facilitating networking and planning joint activities. This has been one of the main inspirations to design the co-production fellowship program whose second round kicked off last Junes Cairo.

4. Our understanding of water and rivers is shaped by popular culture

When we describe our work, for instance in project proposals, we tend to make big claims about the role of media and academia in informing the political agenda and shaping public debates. However, studying and reflecting on the narratives about water and the Nile that dominate public debates and that we as journalists and researchers reproduce, we found that they are often defined by something broader, that can be called popular culture: education, religion, music, cinema, and literature. Therefore, in our diplomatic efforts to promote mutual understanding and dialogue across professions and countries in the Nile basin, we should acknowledge the influence of popular culture, translate it for people and colleagues from other cultural traditions and countries, and contextualise it in the society that has produced it to critically reflect on how it influences our understanding of the river. And this is why, in our most recent project, we have also started to collaborate with artists and water museums.

5. Facts and emotions cannot be separated

When discussing the role of media in water diplomacy in policy making and technical events like the Nile Basin Development Forum, water professionals often ask journalists to report facts and separate them from opinions and emotions. However, this is not how the media works and it is not how storytelling in science communication is often practiced. For instance, scientists are increasingly encouraged to foreground their personal stories, passions, and emotions to communicate their research and make it attractive and relevant for lay audiences. Water diplomats are equally influenced by emotions, particularly in the context of a mystic river like Nile, charged with symbolic and affective meanings. Hence, facts and emotions cannot be separated. Therefore, instead of neglecting emotions, the question we should ask ourselves is: which emotions do we want to elicit through our stories and narratives to promote mutual understanding and collaboration on shared rivers like the Nile? Perhaps to better answer this question we need to bring in a discipline so far not involved in our conversations, psychology, and further engage with the debate on climate storytelling currently discussing what type of stories should we tell to push people to act.

6. Nile narratives are often caught in the “nation trap”

Through our research on Nile narratives in mainstream media, we learnt that most of the representations of the Nile river, and the emotions they elicit, are often called in a “nation trap”. This is evident in debates on contentious issues like the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The protagonists of the story are always the riparian states – Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan – represented as monolithic and homogeneous actors. They speak with one voice, they have one single “national interest”, and they feel emotions like pride, anger, or fear. Their voice is most of the time the voice of the respective national government. When reporting on the Nile, sometimes for simplicity or lack of space, other times for (self)censorship, journalists adopt the lenses of the national interest as the main frame, reproducing the official government’s discourse. The state is taken as a black box, without questioning for instance how water is distributed within each riparian country.

This approach is also reflected and reproduced in our own practices: when organising workshops and fellowships we select journalists and researchers based on their nationality, to make sure that every country is represented in the room. Or when inviting speakers for a webinar on the GERD, we look at their nationality more than at their disciplinary background. When it comes to the Nile, often your passport is more important than your diploma. Of course, nation-states are key actors in transboundary water governance, and the popular culture recalled above is an essential element in forging national identities. However, we need to be aware of the risks of falling into the nation trap, and explore also alternative representations, for instance making sure that our approaches are not only multi-national but also multi-disciplinary, not only trans-boundary, but also trans-disciplinary.

7. Creativity happens at the margins of big debates and mainstream narratives

Given the securitization of Nile issues, challenging mainstream narratives and official discourses based on the national interest can be dangerous for journalists and researchers – and, by the way, this is sadly another element that unites the two groups. When it comes to the Nile and its infrastructures, spaces for freedom of expression, dissenting opinions, and critical voices are rare. In our case, journalists and photographers found such spaces to originally and critically engage with the Nile at the margins of the main debates, like those around the GERD. #EverydayNile is an example of such space, where photojournalists have been asked to re-picture the Nile by focusing on mundane, everyday practices and attachment to the river and its waters. We should strive to safely bring those margins at the centre of the political debate, to give them voice and visibility, like when we exhibited #EverydayNile photos at the UN Headquarters in New York during the 2023 UN Water Conference.

8. Both journalism and research can be rather extractive practices: the need for accountability and participation

Another thing that journalism and research have in common is that – unfortunately – they are reduced to rather extractive practices. To produce our stories or our studies we visit a place – the field – we collect data and talk to people for a few hours or a few days. And then we get back to our desks and laptops to organise and publish the information collected, based on what in the meantime has become “our data”. Two photographers of #EverydayNile, with the support of InfoNile, had the brilliant idea of bringing back the photos they made to the local communities where those photos were shot. They organised local community exhibitions, using the photos to elicit a public conversation about water and climate change. This experience has inspired a new project, engaging journalists, photographers, and researchers in a participatory visual research where the community is involved not only as an audience but also as the author of their own stories.

9. Consuming together the stories that we produce to acknowledge the existence of different perspectives

During the first #EverydayNile regional exhibition, held at the Goethe Institute in Cairo (14-20 July 2022) we learnt the importance of consuming together the stories that we produce. Most of the time we consume stories individually, through the screens of our devices. In “The Story Paradox”, Jonathan Gottschall points out how this practice reinforces established understandings, perceptions, and bubbles, leading us to believe that our perspective is the only one in town. This is particularly problematic in the context of a long and diverse river like the Nile. Being physically in the same room, watching at #EverydayNile photo stories together, and discussing them the day after in a workshop was exceptional. We could acknowledge the existence of different perspectives on the river and its waters. Comparing and contrasting such perspectives helped people to clarify their perspectives and to find connections with others. This dialogic conversation should be facilitated by creating and nurturing spaces like physical exhibitions, workshops, or publications where stories can be juxtaposed, looked at, discussed, and weaved together to identify connections.

10. Building bridges and relations: communication, community, commons

Trying to find a synthesis or a definition of the work that we have been doing in the past years with journalists and researchers in the Nile basin, the image of the bridge stands out as an effective metaphor. We have been trying to build bridges between different professional groups, different countries, and different disciplinary approaches to water. I believe that the relations that we have created and nurtured are more important than the outputs that we have produced. In our journey along the Nile, we have created a community of people united by the commitment to communicate the river in an original, documented, and creative way, across different types of boundaries. And in doing so, we can imagine the river as a common, not in the sense of a resource that we own, but as a space that we belong to.

After I shared these memos at the beginning of the workshop in Cairo, participants started to refer to them as “the ten commandments”: not sure if it was a slip or a joke, maybe both. For sure we laughed at it, since these memos are not set in stone and are open to scrutiny, questioning, and improvement or integration, also learning from and building on the work that lies ahead of us!


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Emanuele Fantini (July 17, 2024). Ten memos on collaboration between journalists and researchers in the Nile basin. FLOWs. Retrieved November 8, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12136


Emanuele Fantini

Emanuele (@emanufanti) is senior lecturer and researcher at the Water Governance Department of IHE Delft. Committed to public engagement and crossover projects with artists and journalists, Emanuele coordinates the project “Open Water Diplomacy. Media, science and transboundary cooperation in the Nile basin”, he hosts the podcasts “The Sources of the Nile”, “Water Alternatives Podcast”, and “Si dice acqua”, and he is the editor of IHE Delft Water Governance Blog, FLOWs.

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