The Bertha Challenge is an opportunity for activists and investigative journalists to spend a year focussing on one pressing social justice issue.
Successful applicants receive a non-residential paid fellowship and a project budget to work independently and together to:
Investigate the causes of and solutions to the annual Bertha Challenge question
Amplify their findings to a wider targeted audience
Connect with diverse stakeholders for information, support and sustainable impact
At Bertha we know that many activists and investigative journalists are already doing ground-breaking work to investigate social justice issues, to amplify their work and to connect with audiences. The Bertha Challenge aims to support this by providing time to work exclusively on projects, the spaces in which to connect with a diverse global cohort of Bertha Fellows, and the resources to develop tangible products speaking directly to the Challenge question.
Our Fellowships offer:
Income for each Bertha Fellow for one year
A Project Fund for each Bertha Fellow to produce a culminating product that responds to the question posed by the Bertha Challenge
A Connect Fund specifically designed to encourage collaboration between Fellows
Peer and mentor support in the form of regular virtual check-ins with Bertha staff and a cohort of Bertha Fellows
Global convenings of Bertha Fellows at the start and end of the Bertha Challenge.
The Bertha Challenge 2023
How is the relationship between politics and corporate control of our food systems contributing to environmental devastation and hunger and how can food production center people and nutrition rather than profit?
Previous Bertha Challenge Questions
2022: How is the relationship between politics and profit contributing to the degradation of our freshwater and oceans, and what can be done to ensure equitable access and protection of these finite resources for people and planet?
2021: How is the relationship between profit and politics contributing to our interconnected climate and ecological crises and what can activists and investigative journalists do to address this?
2020: How is the nexus between property, profit and politics contributing to land and housing injustice, and what can be done to fix this?
Julia Dauksza is a journalist, researcher and open-source intelligence analyst at Reporters Foundation, the first non-profit journalistic center in Poland. She reports for investigative news outlet Frontstory and the cross-border project VSquare. Using interdisciplinary methods, she investigates disinformation, human rights violations and environmental crimes. Her stories were featured in Newsweek and other major publications in Poland, earning her a Grand Press Prize nomination in 2021. Before pursuing a career in journalism, Julia worked as a consultant for non-profit organizations dedicated to environmental protection and animal welfare.
Her Bertha Challenge project seeks to understand how corporate governance is transforming agriculture and food production in Central and Eastern Europe with a specific focus on pork farming. Her research examines the impact of industrialized agriculture’s biggest players, their role in the distribution of resources such as state-owned land and subsidies, their relation to dependent producers and farmers and their influence on decision-makers.
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Lina Isma’il is an environmental and community activist in the fields of food sovereignty and agroecology. She is a co-founder of the Palestinian Agroecological Forum, which is concerned with spreading the philosophy and practice of agroecology as a basis for achieving food sovereignty and preserving nature. She also co-authored the guidebook ‘Conscious Choices’, which discusses the concept of ethical consumption within national, economic, social, health and environmental dimensions in the Palestinian context, and highlights the importance of preserving Palestinian heritage and identity through supporting local producers.
The reality of food systems in Palestine is similar to the food systems worldwide, in terms of the challenges associated with globalization – particularly with international economic institutions and large corporations dominating global markets, undermining local economies, eroding cultural diversity, monopolizing natural resources and damaging ecosystems. But, adding to this complexity, is the settler colonial regime occupying Palestine, coupled with foreign aid agendas.
As a Bertha Challenge Fellow, Lina will investigate those challenges and their interlinked impacts on the livelihoods of Palestinian farmers and the environment, in addition to showcasing the growing food sovereignty movement that aims to emancipate Palestinian farmers from the chains forced upon them, by focusing on the role of the Palestinian community to support this movement. She will be creating a film to raise awareness locally and provide tools and evidence for activists to strengthen the food sovereignty movement.
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David Kabanda is a food and social rights lawyer in Uganda with a special interest in human rights compliant food and trade related systems. He practices this through action-research, legal advocacy and public interest litigation. He is an expert in food law and a global advisor in sustainable agri-food systems. His work is directed towards a framework law on resilient food systems, stopping hunger and prevention of the prevalent burden of malnutrition. David is a director at CEFROHT and has worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization and UNESCO.
His Bertha Challenge project will decipher how the government’s failure to regulate the food sector in Uganda is leading to violations of the right to adequate food by corporate and political elites. He will investigate hunger and malnutrition among vulnerable individuals and communities’ access to land, seed and the law.
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Ana Larrañaga is a Mexican nutritionist and activist who has worked for food, information and health rights. She specializes in environmental education and holds an MA in Food and Development from the University of Sussex and the Institute of Development Studies.
Ana has worked with non-governmental organization (NGO) coalitions in Mexico and the Latin American region, with whom she has advocated for the implementation of evidence-based food policies to prevent diet-related non-communicable diseases and different forms of malnutrition.
For her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Ana will work with El Poder del Consumidor, a recognized consumer rights organization. Her project will focus on documenting, through case studies, how the commercial interests of different industries exert influence within food systems, thus accelerating adverse environmental and health impacts. The project will link with NGOs and communities in Mexico City to understand and promote resilient alternatives through traditional, healthy and local diets.
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Lindsey Loberg is the co-director of Boulder Food Rescue, a Colorado, U.S.-based, grassroots food distributor working towards a more just and less wasteful food system. Lindsey works to dismantle hunger and oppressive power structures, particularly those influencing the non-profit food sector. Their early involvement with activism and organizing came as a teacher and union worker during the Wisconsin Uprising and Occupy Movement. They held 25 jobs before turning 25, some in food, all in low-wage work, perpetuating hunger.
Lindsey is involved with Boulder’s Human Relations Commission – a government body intended to safeguard human rights; their local branch of the Debt Collective – a national debtors’ union working to abolish debts of survival and basic opportunity; and a number of professional networks, including Food Rescue Alliance, Community Resource Center’s Root Cause Network and Closing the Hunger Gap’s Next Shift Community of Practice.
Lindsey’s Bertha Challenge project will focus on the alliance between charitable food, corporations and politics. They will create a curriculum for grassroots, non-profit food distributors to challenge this relationship through participatory research, direct action, community power building and other systems change work.
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Brezh Malaba – who describes himself as “a journalist, writer and polymath on all things sensible” – has edited Zimbabwe’s biggest newspapers. Two years ago, he co-founded The NewsHawks, the country’s leading digital investigative reporting and breaking news platform. Drawing on his rich experiences in public and private media as well as cross-border collaborations, Brezh is a firm believer in the role of the media as a potent instrument for social impact.
In his investigation, Brezh will untangle an enduring conundrum: Despite pumping billions of U.S. dollars into agricultural development, why has Zimbabwe experienced food deficits, with half the southern African country’s population living in extreme poverty? Indeed, how did Zimbabwe – a net exporter of grain, known for decades as a ‘breadbasket’ of Africa – suddenly find itself stranded in the treacherous quicksand of low crop yields, food insecurity, endemic hunger and chronic malnutrition?
Apart from the damage inflicted on agriculture by corruption, Zimbabwe faces another existential threat: the harm caused by farmers’ high dependency on chemical fertilizers. The investigation will delve into the imperatives of ecologically friendly and sustainable agriculture, shining the spotlight on both the deficiencies and opportunities for prosperity.
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Sara Manisera is an award-winning independent journalist, author and director based in Italy. Her works focus on the environment, human rights, agriculture and civil society.
She has produced reports, investigations, interactive documentaries in Italy, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Kosovo and Bosnia for several media such as ARTE, Libération, Deutsche Welle, CNN, Al Jazeera, Lifegate, The New Humanitarian, RAI and Slow News.
She combines journalism and public participation, through local events, debates and festivals organized with FADA, a collective of journalists, photographers and authors, which she has co-founded. In recent years, she has extensively worked on worker exploitation in the agricultural sector and the environment, with a focus on wheat.
Through the Bertha Challenge Fellowship, she will continue her research on wheat, specifically on the pasta supply chain, to understand the impacts of an agro-industrial system, controlled by a few, on the environment and on people’s health. She will investigate which wheat is used to make the pasta exported under the ‘Made in Italy’ label, where it is produced, who the importers are, where the price speculation mechanism takes place and which industrial groups control the pasta market. From the seed to the pasta, the high concentration of power allows a relatively small group of corporations to shape markets and research in a way that serves the ultimate goal of shareholder profit maximization and not the public good.
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Bruno Martins Morais is a lawyer and an anthropologist with experience in socio-environmental law, and specializations in supply chain compliance, transnational environmental crimes and violations of the rights of traditional peoples. He holds a BA in Law and a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo, and is a doctoral candidate in Socio-Environmental Law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná. He works as an activist and legal advisor to community-based and civil society organizations. With the support of Bertha Foundation, and in partnership with Indigenous organizations, Bruno intends to research the pressure of grain monocultures on Indigenous territories. In the 1970s, the military dictatorship promoted the expansion of grain crops over Indigenous territories as a policy of integration of these peoples into national society. These policies undermined food sovereignty and spread hunger. The Bolsonaro administration reclaimed this same project, announcing partnerships with Indigenous people in a modernization agenda that would bring these populations out of “backwardness”. At the same time, Brazil has registered an increase of 14 million people living below the hunger line. Bruno wants to investigate the situation of food security in Indigenous territories, its relationship with international supply chains, deforestation and climate change.
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Marius Münstermann is a freelance journalist with a focus on agriculture, extractive industries, supply chains and environmental crime. His investigations have revealed illegal waste exports, questionable large-scale agrobusiness investments, illegal logging, illegal fisheries, child labour in illegal mining and other grievances. His text, photos, videos and multimedia web documentaries are published in German and international print, TV and online media.
Marius lives in a village in central Germany. Surrounded by a rural area that is dominated by extensive fields and conventionally managed farms, he applies principles of regenerative farming, permaculture and agroforestry to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits in his garden.
His Bertha Challenge project will focus on soil. Healthy soils are the foundation of our food systems, providing clean water and habitats for biodiversity while potentially storing huge amounts of carbon dioxide. As the European Union has announced its 2030 Soil Strategy as well as a new Soil Health Law to be introduced in 2023, Marius will investigate the political framework as well as the investment and lobbying strategies of major agribusiness corporations with regards to soil.
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Tharma Pillai is a democracy activist and the co-founder of Undi18 – a youth movement that successfully advocated for the lowering of the voting age in Malaysia from 21 to 18 years old. His advocacy has helped enfranchise an additional 5.8 million voters, transforming the Malaysian political landscape. He is a recipient of Tatler Asia’s Most Influential (2022), Generation T Asia (2022) and Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 (2021) – together with other international Fellowships and national awards.
For his Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Tharma will be working with journalist Fellow, Ian Yee, to build the Cangkul Collective – a movement to achieve food security and end malnutrition, via the empowerment of farmers and the democratization of farming. This initiative is critical, considering Malaysia’s severe rates of child malnutrition and lack of legal protections for smallholder farmers.
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Greta Rico is a Mexican freelance documentary photographer, journalist and feminist educator based in Mexico City focused on gender and human rights issues. Her work has been published in magazines, print and digital media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The HuffPost, El País, Cuartoscuro, La Jornada and Lado B. She has collaborated with United Nations offices and with various civil society organizations. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Mexico and in cities such as New York, Tehran, Isfahan, Rome, Guayaquil, Kota Kinabalu, Valparaiso and London. Greta has a Masters Degree in Women Studies, she is part of the Women Photograph Advisory Committee, Diversify Photo and the Women ́s Media Center’s SheSource panel.
During her Fellowship year, she will work with four rural communities on the outskirts of Mexico City – the most populated urban center in Latin America which is currently experiencing an urgent food crisis. Greta will be documenting shortage, malnutrition and the impact on nutrition since Mexico no longer protects local farmers from genetically modified-seeds and farming. She will investigate how native corn and production and nutrition of corn-products are threatened by the entry of genetically modified seeds without any policy protection, and how the milpa and chinampas – agricultural methods that have existed since pre-Hispanic times – represent an alternative of resistance and local food sovereignty.
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Annie Ruth Sabangan has been a journalist in the Philippines for nearly three decades. She started as a beat reporter covering the environment, agriculture and agrarian reform where she honed her skills in producing impactful stories and in-depth investigative reports. Her works have been recognized by the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Jaime V. Ongpin Award for Journalism and the Luis R. Prieto Journalism Award.
For her Bertha Challenge project, she will produce a series of multimedia investigative reports that will examine, expose and explain the impacts of industrial and monocropped food systems in Mindanao in southern Philippines on health, human rights and the environment.
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Ian Yee is a journalist, documentary producer and co-founder of The Fourth, a not-for-profit investigative and impact media social enterprise. The Fourth funds its investigative journalism mainly through commercial media production services and education programs. He is also the Executive Director of the award-winning Environmental Reporting Collective, and was formerly a national consultant for United Nations Children’s Fund in Malaysia, where he led a regional program to develop empathy skills among young student leaders across Southeast Asia, India and China.
Ian’s team’s use of journalism and impact media to advocate for social justice has seen him selected as an Obama Leader, Acumen Fellow, UK International Leaders Programme Fellow and Pulitzer Centre RJF advisory committee member.
Ian will be working with activist Fellow, Tharma Pillai, to address growing food insecurity in Malaysia through the democratization of farming. Together they will create a documentary and explainer series to raise awareness about the corruption, rent-seeking and corporate greed that have led to alarming levels of hunger and child stunting. They will also develop an online academy platform for poor communities to learn smallholder farming practices, and advocacy tools to safeguard farmers’ rights.
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Explore Past Projects
Bertha Challenge 2022 Fellows
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AnuOluwapo Adelakun
AnuOluwapo traveled to five different states in Nigeria and produced a documentary series about the dynamics behind the lack of access of many Nigerians to clean water.
Shinji Carvalho
Shinji spent their Fellowship year traveling between Indigenous communities, urban peripheries and small farmers in Brazil, who face extreme threats from land grabbing, mining, logging and the hostile political environment. They wrote a book documenting the water challenges that communities face.
Fumba Chama
Fumba worked intimately with grassroots and community groups to produce ‘LIFELESS’ – a music album on water access and political power in Zambia.
Tommy Greene
Tommy used his Bertha Challenge Fellowship to write a series of investigative articles on the industrial scale sand dredging in Lough Neagh, one of biggest freshwater lake systems in north-western Europe.
Maria Hernandez May
Maria created three short films on how relationships between politics and profit are contributing to the degradation of Guåhan’s (Guam) main freshwater aquifer and the contamination of the island’s coastal waters.
Luisa Izuzquiza
With Jelena Prtorić (journalist Fellow, Germany), Jelena conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Together they created a ‘water hub’ website housing their investigations and activist resources.
Pascalinah Kabi
Pascalinah spent her Fellowship year investigating the devastating impact of mining on water in Lesotho. She focused on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the imbalance between the development of water resources for commercial and mining industries with community water priorities. In addition to her articles, Pascalinah wrote a book on her investigations, and produced a short film and podcast.
Abdikhayr Mohamed Hussein
Abdikhayr worked with various clans among rural communities in Somalia affected by severe drought and prolonged water conflicts to develop a guidance handbook for the fair and sustainable management of shared water sources.
Fredrick Mugira
Fredrick wrote a series of articles and created a short documentary on the impact of plastic pollution on Uganda’s Rift Valley lakes. He wrote about sources of plastic pollution, the companies responsible for manufacturing single use plastic bottles and the failures by local authorities to enforce environmental standards.
Musuk Nolte
Musuk traveled to different territories in Peru to photograph communities’ relationships to water. He organized a workshop and exhibition with young people in Belén, where communities live on raised buildings above contaminated river water for eight months of the year. Musuk published his work as usable art in the form of poster books.
Jelena Prtorić
With Luisa Izuzquiza (activist Fellow, Belgium), Jelena conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Together they created a ‘water hub’ website housing their investigations and activist resources.
AnuOluwapo is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and director of video productions at The Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation.
Living in the most densely populated country in Africa, AnuOluwapo’s Fellowship work is framed by her first hand experience of erratic and highly unreliable water supplies. She produced a documentary series about the dynamics behind the lack of access of many Nigerians to clean water. She traveled to five different states in Nigeria, investigating gold mining and industrial water pollution, and failed government drinking water projects. Her documentary presents the connection between water, politics and corruption across Nigeria and its effects on people and the environment.
AnuOluwapo holds an MA in Journalism & Documentary Practice from the University of Sussex. She is a founding member of the Women’s Economic Imperative, a UNICEF Voices of Youth alumni, Carrington Youth Fellow, U.S. Consul General Award Recipient, UN WOMEN/Empower Women Global Champion for Change, Chevening alumni and USGEEA Women achievers awardee.
Shinji works with groups led by women and LBT+ people throughout Brazil, especially in their activities related to the environment and conflicts. Shinji’s work includes supporting mobilization efforts, fundraising, building networks and participating in joint efforts to protect rights.
Shinji spent their Fellowship year traveling between Indigenous communities, urban peripheries and small farmers in Brazil, including in the Amazon and Cerrado regions, who face extreme threats from land grabbing, mining, logging and the hostile political environment.
Shinji wrote a book documenting the water challenges that communities face, and used these to tell stories of their wider struggles for existence.
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Fumba, known professionally as Pilato, is a recording artist and social activist. The name Pilato is an acronym for ‘People in Lyrical Arena Taking Over.’ Born and raised in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province, Fumba commenced his career as a poet and in 2010 he launched into music. With four studio albums, Pilato has continued to inspire political debates and conversations, while championing a more equal and fair society. As a result of his critical political standpoint, he has endured fierce political threats and been arrested several times. In 2020, he founded an organization called People’s Action for Accountability and Good Governance (PAAGZ), a local CSO promoting good governance and accountability, where he currently serves as the Executive Director.
During his Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Fumba worked intimately with grassroots and community groups, producing a music album on water access and political power in Zambia. Fumba’s project is called ‘LIFELESS.’ His ten songs are accompanied by powerful music videos.
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Tommy Greene
Location: Northern Ireland Host Organization:
The Detail
Tommy is a freelance investigative journalist who writes about the environment, health and politics from Ireland, the UK and Spain.
Tommy used his Bertha Challenge Fellowship to investigate industrial scale sand dredging in Lough Neagh, one of biggest freshwater lake systems in north-western Europe. The lake is owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury, an English aristocrat, who has overseen decades of unregulated extraction whilst raking in massive profits.
Tommy used a lidar survey to publicly document, for the first time, the extent of damage caused to the lake bed. He uncovered apparently illegitimate tax breaks awarded to a number of the biggest Lough Neagh extraction firms, prompting a government investigation, and he traced the end point for sand taken from the lough, uncovering devastating environmental damage and destruction.
His Fellowship project also investigated the Shaftesbury Estate’s profiteering at Lough Neagh, questions over its historical claim to the lake and surrounding hinterland, as well as previous failed attempts to bring the lough into public ownership.
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Maria is a CHamoru environmental and cultural rights activist. She is also a lineal descendent of ancestral land in Guam called Ritidian, which is proposed to be used as a buffer zone for a U.S. Marine Live Fire Training Range Complex. She organizes with Hita Litekyan, a coalition of CHamoru families pushing back against the firing range complex.
Maria’s Fellowship project focused on how relationships between politics and profit are contributing to the degradation of Guåhan’s (Guam) main freshwater aquifer and the contamination of the island’s coastal waters. She had a particular focus on a massive U.S. Marine Live Fire Training Range Complex spanning 700 acres that is being built above the island’s primary water source.
Maria created three short films about her year’s investigations, with the first film highlighting the risks to Guam’s water resources by U.S. military projects and how Guam’s political status as an unincorporated territory of the U.S. makes the island vulnerable to projects that harm its natural and cultural resources. The second film looked at the impacts to water from U.S. imperialism and hyper militarization of the Pacific region; and the third film placed a spotlight on historical contamination in Guam’s wetlands and lagoon and links to health problems within the community including devastating testimonies of death and sickness of local inhabitants of Guam. Maria’s films were shown at community screenings on the island.
Maria serves as a board director of Micronesia Climate Change Alliance, a grassroots network of individuals and organizations dedicated to creating community-centered solutions to climate change; an organizer with I Hagan Famalao’an Guahan, a CHamoru Women’s Association of Guåhan founded on the collective mission to enhance, promote, protect and foster the social, economic, cultural, spiritual and political well-being of CHamoru women, girls and gender-diverse people within the overall Guåhan community.
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Luisa is a freedom of information activist and campaign coordinator with Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. Luisa uses European freedom of information laws to conduct investigations, campaigns and litigation for greater transparency and accountability. Luisa’s work has a specific focus on European border control policies, EU lobbying and EU climate policies.
For her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Luisa worked with investigative journalist Jelena Prtorić (journalist Fellow, Germany). Luisa and Jelena conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Luisa used freedom of information requests and interviews with activists and communities to build a database of information about pesticide pollution of water sources in four European countries, including her native Spain. The database is held on a ‘water hub’ website, along with Jelena’s investigative stories.
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Through her Bertha Challenge investigation, Pascalinah has become the first Lesotho female investigative journalist to publish a book. She has a keen interest in science related issues, gender and politics. She serves on the MNN Centre for Investigative Journalism Board of Directors and is the Federation of International Journalists’ Trainer of Trainers on Gender Safety in the Newsroom.
Pascalinah spent her Fellowship year investigating the devastating impact of mining on water. She focused on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the imbalance between the development of water resources for commercial and mining industries with community water priorities, in the face of acute and increased droughts.
Her investigations uncovered that the British controlled Letšeng Diamond Mine was knowingly responsible for polluting drinking water, despite previous public claims by both the mine and the Government that this wasn’t the case. She also revealed a confidential report showing that a number of mines were contaminating rivers in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project catchment area (a source of drinking water for Lesotho and South Africa) with dangerous levels of nitrates.
Pascalinah is an award-winning journalist, and has been awarded reporting grants administered by University of Witwatersrand’s Department of Journalism (Africa-China Investigative Reporting 2018 and 2021), the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (2021) and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (2021). She was commissioned by Euronews to investigate and produce a Lesotho segment of Cry Like a Boy – an original series on men challenging stereotypes and fighting for gender equality.
Abdikhayr works with the Somali Government and local and international organizations in humanitarian assistance, peace-building and development for displaced and rural communities in Somalia.
During his Fellowship, Abdikhayr worked with various clans among rural communities affected by severe drought and prolonged water conflicts. He organized consultation meetings with community elders and women’s groups across five different states.
The consultation meetings were structured as mediations that Abdikhayr used to develop a guidance handbook for the fair and sustainable management of shared water sources in Somalia’s rural valley areas. He also produced an accompanying set of short films documenting the mediation and conflict-resolution processes among the communities that he worked in.
Fredrick is an award-winning water and climate change journalist, media trainer and communications specialist. He founded Water Journalists Africa, a non-profit media group that brings together over 700 journalists in 50 African countries to report on water-related issues. He is also co-founder of InfoNile, a platform that maps data on water issues in the Nile River Basin and overlays them with journalism stories to promote transboundary peace.
For his Bertha Challenge Fellowship project, Fredrick investigated the impact of plastic pollution on Uganda’s Rift Valley lakes. He wrote about sources of plastic pollution, the companies responsible for manufacturing single use plastic bottles and the failures by local authorities to enforce environmental standards. As part of his Fellowship, he also created a short documentary, and organised a community exhibition of photographs taken during his investigations.
Fredrick has an MA in Communication for Development. He also studied a PGD in Environmental Journalism and Communication and has a BA in Mass Communication. A National Geographic Storytelling explorer, and a Pulitzer Center Grantee, Fredrick has reported from various countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States of America.
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Musuk is a photographer who works on documentary projects regarding human rights, Indigenous communities and environmental issues.
For his Bertha Challenge project, Musuk traveled to different territories in Peru – Iquitos, Belén, Cusco and Puno – to investigate access to drinking water and communities’ relationship to water. He photographed communities and their responses to water scarcity and water pollution.
In Belén, communities live on raised buildings above contaminated river water for eight months of the year, worsened by illegal mining in the river basin. Musuk worked with a group of young people who took powerful portraits of one another in a local lagoon for a community action.
Musuk’s project culminated in the production of a photo essay book, with posters of a selection of his photos – usable art that he distributed among those that he worked with during the year.
A Magnum Foundation and Pulitzer Center Grantee, as well as a National Geographic Explorer, Musuk is also founder and editor of “KWY Ediciones”, an independent platform for the collective editing and learning of visual narratives for authors in Latin America. He is also part of the urban lighting action collective, Grita Luz.
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Jelena is a freelance journalist who has reported for a wide variety of publications in English, French, Italian and her native Croatian. Her work has focused on gender and human rights, migration, the environment/ climate, culture and social movements, through an investigative and often cross-border lens. As of 2020, Jelena is the Arena Climate Network coordinator for Arena for Journalism in Europe. She is also an occasional podcaster and translator of graphic novels.
For her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Jelena worked with Luisa Izuzquiza (activist Fellow, Belgium). Jelena and Luisa conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Jelena produced stories on specific water-related issues in the EU, France, Spain, Italy and The Netherlands. With Luisa, she created a ‘water hub’ website housing their investigations and a database of information about agricultural pollution of water bodies.
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Abiose published a series of articles on the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta. She used her reports to write and stage a play about the devastating cost of oil extraction in Ogoniland.
LJ Amsterdam
LJ organized ‘tac hack’ workshops – spaces for New York activists to come up with new and imaginative direct-action tactics. Alongside this, she built an activist digital resource commons.
Yasna Carolina Mussa Valenzuela
Yasna investigated the impact of lithium extraction in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, used for electric car production in Europe.
Linh Do
Linh worked with campaign groups in Australia to design tailored engagement strategies on supporting and cultivating climate activism.
Federico Etiene Zuvire Cruz
Fede produced three films, telling the stories of three women in Guatemala resisting profit-driven destruction of Indigenous territories.
Juan Francisco Donoso
Juan created a series of educational materials for young people in Germany on the topic of lithium mining in South America for the German electric car market.
Dan Ilic
In addition to growing his weekly, award-winning satire podcast, A Rational Fear, Dan launched a new, monthly, climate-focussed podcast called Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation.
Andrea Isabel Ixchiú Hernández
Andrea produced three films, telling the stories of three women in Guatemala resisting profit-driven destruction of Indigenous territories.
Antonia Juhasz
Antonia published a series of articles analyzing the state of the oil industry through a critical period that included the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 U.S. election.
Alex Kelly
Alex created ‘The Planting’, a speculative audio performance that invites audiences to imagine a more hopeful and just future, and the pragmatic steps needed to get there.
Narrira Lemos de Souza
Narrira provided digital security training and resources to threatened environmental activists and Indigenous land defenders in Brazil.
Michael Owen Snyder
Mike traveled around Chesapeake Bay, photographing and interviewing residents about rising sea levels that threaten the U.S.’s largest estuary, and the communities and wetland habitats that live alongside it.
Bhrikuti Rai
Bhrikuti investigated how collusion between legislators and the construction industry in Nepal is enabling ecologically disastrous sand mining in the Chure Hills.
Charles Saki
Charles produced a series of articles, a short documentary and a book, investigating how corruption and mismanagement have led to a failure of basic sanitation services in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Angeles Solis
Angeles led a survey with Amazon employees and community members on Staten Island, New York, to capture the impact of Amazon’s warehouse growth.
Puah Sze Ning
Sze Ning produced a short video toolkit to provide accessible information for Indigenous Orang Asli communities in Malaysia that are returning to their customary lands.
Elroi Yee
Elroi documented the detrimental impact that logging is having on the customary lands of Orang Asli communities in Malaysia.
Abiose works at the Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation, where she coordinates a program that focuses on using the tool of investigative reporting for accountability and transparency. As a recipient of the Red Ribbon Award, and a fellow of the World Federation of Science Journalists, she has been at the forefront of reporting on science and development issues.
During her Fellowship year, Abiose published a series of articles and video reports about the social and economic failures that have contributed to the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta region. She visited illegal oil refineries, stalled oil-spill clean-ups and gas flare sites, to show the extent that communities have been affected by oil extraction in the region.
Abiose used these experiences from her investigations to write and stage a play in Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta in an attempt to reach a wider audience. The play, Environmental Refugees, confronted issues such as the lack of drinking water, lack of secure employment and health problems caused by oil extraction in Ogoni and other oil-rich areas. It was attended by over 300 residents from 17 local communities and was so well-received, a production company is talking to her about turning her play into a feature film.
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LJ Amsterdam
Location: United States of America Host Organization:
Mayday Space
LJ is an organizer, direct action trainer and a dancer. Over the past decade she has worked with resettled refugees, opiate users, families fractured by mass incarceration, homeowners in foreclosures and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of climate change. LJ is a Collective Member of Mayday Space, an organizing center and social movement hub in Brooklyn, a trainer for The Center for Story-Based Strategy and The Ruckus Society and the civilian-ally board member of About Face: Veterans Against the War.
LJ used her Fellowship to create a nonviolent direct action incubation and experimentation lab. She organized a series of ‘tac hacks’ – spaces for activists and professional makers such as electricians, designers and carpenters to come up with new and imaginative direct-action tactics. LJ’s final workshop was a climate justice ‘training of trainers’ using the tac hack methodology.
LJ also built a digital resource commons for activists. The site includes a library of activist books, manuals and videos, alongside a database of physical organizing tools that New York-based activists can borrow from the Mayday space.
Yasna is a freelance Chilean reporter, based in Santiago de Chile. For a decade she has worked as an international correspondent for various written and radio media, reporting from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Her work has been published in La Tercera (Chile), The New York Times, Vice (Mexico) and Mediapart (France). She is co-founder of Late Magazine, where she is currently working as Editor and mediambiente.cl, a site committed to climate change.
During her Bertha Challenge project, Yasna worked with Juan Donoso (activist Fellow), to investigate the extraction of lithium from the ‘lithium triangle’ covering Chile, Argentina and Bolivia for electric cars marketed in Europe. Yasna visited sites of lithium mining to explore how the mining is affecting local ecosystems and communities, including the Atacama salt plains, home to one of the largest lithium mines in South America.
Linh has spent the last decade in climate action, across advocacy, media and social enterprise. She is passionate about strengthening civic institutions to achieve climate justice through tackling social inequality. Linh led the Australia and Pacific office for Climate Reality, Al Gore’s leadership program. She previously served as the editor-in-chief at The Verb, an environmental newswire service, where she covered the Paris Agreement negotiations. She is currently a board member at Climate Action Network Australia.
Linh worked with a number of campaign groups to design tailored engagement strategies on supporting and cultivating climate activism. She published a report on cultural adaptation of climate campaign resources for activists in Asia with The Campaign Strategy Fellowship. She also wrote a research paper on upcoming opportunities for public engagement with Climate Action Australia. Linh organized a series of roundtable events to present her findings to participants from various Australian climate organizations.
Throughout the Fellowship year, Linh was a guest co-host on the Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, a monthly podcast by Dan Ilic (journalist Fellow) that aimed to bring discussions on difficult climate topics to new audiences through comedy.
Fede is a storyteller and land defender. He works with social movements and communities to develop narratives that respond to day to day struggles, and that dismantle oppressive structures.
During his Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Fede worked with Andrea Isabel Ixchiú Hernández (journalist Fellow) to share three stories of resistance told by women. Their work focuses on the intersection of organized women, Indigenous rights and territory with an emphasis on water, land and governance.
Along with the three films, Andrea and Fede also organized ‘Curra da Terra’, an online gathering of more than 267 Indigenous women from 116 Indigenous nations in 37 different countries. The event called on Indigenous women from around the world to share their experiences of resisting profit-driven destruction of Indigenous territories, and the violence that accompanies it.
Juan is a climate justice organizer, campaigner and writer based in Berlin. He seeks to foster dialogues between anti-capitalist movements and community building networks. In recent years, Juan has been working with Bloque Latinoamericano, a collective of people and organizations of the left in Berlin. His work focuses on the defense of nature and territories, while highlighting the role that European transnational companies have in Latin America.
During his Bertha Challenge project, Juan worked with Yasna Carolina Mussa Valenzuela (journalist Fellow), to investigate the extraction of lithium from the ‘lithium triangle’ covering Chile, Argentina and Bolivia for electric cars marketed in Europe. Together they visited the Atacama salt plains, home to one of the largest lithium mines in South America, to understand the effects of lithium extraction on the local ecosystem and communities.
Juan used the community interviews, along with the work published by Yasna, to develop an educational curriculum for young people in Germany on lithium extraction. He also developed a series of short videos and animations for young people and teachers to explore alongside the curriculum.
Dan is one of Australia’s most prolific comedy filmmakers and radio journalists. Calling himself an “investigative humorist”, Dan has used comedy as an activist tool throughout his professional career in Australia and the U.S. He has performed in front of thousands of people across Australia, including sell out shows at the Sydney Opera House and on ABC Radio National.
Dan is the host of the award-winning podcast and live comedy show, A Rational Fear – a show that brings together journalists, comedians, experts and politicians and uses comedy to talk about climate issues that get overlooked in mainstream media. During his Bertha Challenge year, he used this weekly podcast to engage new audiences with the climate crisis through comedy. He launched a monthly climate focused podcast, Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, which was co-hosted by Linh Do (activist Fellow).
Dan’s Fellowship year culminated with live shows in two of Australia’s climate-vulnerable cities: Newcastle, a traditional mining area and home to Australia’s largest coal mines; and Bega, one of the areas worst hit by the 2020 bushfires, where promised emergency funds still haven’t been delivered.
Andrea is a journalist, human rights activist and defender of the territory. She is a Nobel Women’s Initiative Fellow and was awarded the Sakharov Prize Fellowship, which honors individuals and groups of people who have dedicated their lives to the defense of human rights and freedom of thought. Andrea has also been an Indigenous authority in her hometown of Totonicapán.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Andrea worked with Federico Etiene Zuvire Cruz (activist Fellow) to share three stories of resistance told by women. Their work focuses on the intersection of organized women, Indigenous rights and territory with an emphasis on water, land and governance.
Along with the three films, Andrea and Fede also organized ‘Curra da Terra’, an online gathering of more than 267 Indigenous women from 116 Indigenous nations in 37 different countries. The event called on Indigenous women from around the world to share their experiences of resisting profit-driven destruction of Indigenous territories, and the violence that accompanies it.
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Antonia Juhasz
Location: United States of America Host Organization:
Democracy Now!
Antonia Juhasz is an energy analyst, author and investigative journalist specializing in oil. Her investigations include the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, oil exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Paris Climate Accord, the role of oil and natural gas in the Afghanistan war and resistance movements from Standing Rock to the Norwegian Arctic. Her articles and opinion pieces appear in numerous leading magazines and newspapers. Antonia is the author of three books: Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, The Tyranny of Oil and The Bush Agenda.
For her Bertha Challenge project, Antonia published a series of articles analyzing the state of the oil industry through a critical period that included the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 U.S. election. She focused on groups that are challenging the power of oil companies, and the role of women and girls in leading those movements.
Alex is an organizer and artist based on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, ‘Australia’. She has worked in film, theater, communications and troublemaking in many forms. This includes taking part in blockades from Jabiluka in Australia to la zad in France, collaborating on the Indigenous language and theater project, ‘Ngapartji Ngapartji’, and curating the Something Somewhere Film Festival. As a Producer, Director and Impact Producer, Alex has worked on powerful documentary films including Queen of the Desert, THE ISLAND, Island of the Hungry Ghosts and In My Blood It Runs. Alex was also the Global Impact and Distribution Producer on Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything project.
For her Bertha Challenge project, Alex created ‘The Planting’, a speculative audio performance that invites audiences to imagine a more hopeful and just future, and the pragmatic steps needed to get there. Her narrative imagines the introduction of a large-scale ecological recovery, Indigenous-led, employment program in Australia. The experimental sound work is designed to be experienced in tandem with ‘noisy’ weather events such as hailstorms or high winds, bringing together an imagined future and present reality of the climate crisis.
Narrira works as a UX researcher and technologist based in Brazil. She is a digital security trainer for social movements, activist organizations and third-sector organizations, aiming to strengthen privacy and security in collective actions and data uses. Narrira has also worked as a UX Researcher, examining technology products to improve privacy and engagement for human rights defenders. Previously, Narrira was a Mozilla Fellow embedded in the host organization Derechos Digitales.
As a Bertha Challenge Fellow, Narrira worked closely with environmental organizations, and climate and Indigenous activists to strengthen their digital security. She travelled to remote villages where a lack of internet access and digital skills have left activists vulnerable to security breaches and threats. Narrira conducted multi-day workshops, providing some basic steps that participants could use to increase their confidence in working with digital devices. In addition, Narrira ran a series of online tailored courses for activist organizations in Brazil and further afield.
Narrira used the workshops to develop a website with a series of public resources on digital security for activists and Indigenous land defenders.
Mike is a photographer, filmmaker and environmental scientist who uses his knowledge of visual storytelling and conservation to create narratives that drive social change. He holds an MSc in Environmental Sustainability from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has directed award-winning films in the Arctic, the Amazon, the Himalayas and East Africa. His work has been featured by National Geographic, The Guardian, Vox, the BBC and others.
For his Bertha Challenge project, Mike spent a month travelling around Chesapeake Bay, photographing and interviewing residents. The Bay is the U.S.’s largest estuary, and an important wetland habitat, facing rising sea levels that threaten the homes and infrastructure of local communities.
Mike used blue tape to physically mark where the coastline is expected to reach by 2100. His photos show the projected coastline cutting across play areas, roads and houses. He also took portraits of local residents standing in places of personal significance with a measurement stick showing how high the water is expected to rise in that location. The portraits are accompanied by interviews with people talking about the importance of the area and about the future of Chesapeake Bay.
Alongside these photos, Mike also produced aerial images showing how much land will be lost by the end of the century if nothing is done to address climate change, compared to how much land will be lost if immediate and radical action is taken.
Bhrikuti is a multimedia journalist based in Kathmandu. During her decade-long career, she has reported extensively on environment, technology and human rights. Bhrikuti loves all things audio, and is co-creator of the feminist podcast Boju Bajai, which she started in 2016 with poet Itisha Giri. Her work has appeared in several Nepali and international media, including The Kathmandu Post, Nepali Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed News. In 2017, she won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Masters degree at Columbia University in New York, where she specialized in investigative journalism.
Bhrikuti used her Bertha Challenge Fellowship to investigate the extent of the ecological damage caused by illegal sand extraction from rivers across Nepal, and its impact on the most vulnerable communities. She investigated the collusion between business and politics, in particular connections between politicians with influence over Nepal’s ecological legislation, and the sand extraction and construction industries. Alongside her investigative stories, Bhrikuti developed a public database with records of Nepal’s public officials and their business interests.
Charles is a Zimbabwean journalist and freedom of expression activist. He has a keen interest in community centric investigative journalism, with a particular focus on social justice and environmental management issues. In 2010, he was one of the founding employees of the Media Centre in Harare, where he was instrumental in establishing a resource centre for freelance journalists and promoting citizen journalism in communities across Zimbabwe. Charles is a Radio Netherlands Certified trainer of trainers in multimedia production and a Programs Officer and Editor at Community Radio Harare, a community radio initiative.
Charles’ Bertha Challenge project focused on the effects of corruption and mismanagement in the delivery of basic sanitation services for marginalized communities, in the context of an escalating climate crisis. He set up the website Dry & Dirty as a platform for news and resources about water pollution and political corruption in Harare and beyond.
In addition to his investigative stories, Charles created a documentary where he talked to communities affected by Harare’s water crisis, including communities whose water supplies have been cut off by illegal construction work on Harare’s wetlands. He also produced an e-book to present his year’s research.
Angeles is Lead Organizer of the Workplace Justice Team at Make the Road New York. Make the Road New York is one of the largest membership led community organizations in New York, providing direct services and organizing for housing, labor, immigrant rights, police accountability, environmental justice and more. Angeles drives the organization’s campaigning against the damage Amazon is doing to communities across New York and the country.
For her Bertha Challenge project, Angeles led a team of graduate students at New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service to survey and analyze data from Amazon employees and community members capturing the labor, community and environmental impact of Amazon’s warehouse growth in Staten Island, New York. Angeles and a coalition of labor unions, community organizations and policy experts intend to release this report at the start of the New York session to build power in passing the first ever state level anti-trust legislation in the country to break up Amazon’s monopoly power.
Angeles and LJ Amsterdam (activist Fellow) collaborated on creating mass popular education materials, including an animated workshop guide highlighting Amazon’s exploitation of labor and land, and led direct actions with immigrant community members and Amazon workers.
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Sze Ning has been working with Indigenous communities in Malaysia for over 15 years, assisting in advocacy training, documenting and welfare aid.
Sze Ning worked with Elroi Yee (journalist Fellow) to focus on Malaysia’s Indigenous Orang Asli communities who are moving out of government resettlement schemes and returning to their customary lands. These lands are often exploited by the state and commercial enterprises for profit, leaving little resources for Indigenous communities.
Sze Ning and Elroi visited the Orang Asli villages several times during their Fellowship year to better understand what they need to organize against efforts to displace them. Sze Ning found that communities lack information on the most basic of public services. In addition to acting as a liaison point between the villages and healthcare professionals (a vital role during the COVID-19 pandemic), Sze Ning produced a short video toolkit that can be distributed over WhatsApp. She used humor and animations to provide accessible information on topics such as how to document customary lands and how to deal with land incursions by logging companies.
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Elroi is a multimedia investigative journalist, whose stories have ranged from Indigenous peoples and human trafficking, to refugees. His work has received numerous accolades, including being twice nominated for a Peabody Award, winning five SOPA Awards and seven Asian Media Awards. During his time at R.AGE, the team has won the Kajai Award twice, and was conferred the United Nations Malaysia Award in 2016.
Elroi worked with Puah Sze Ning (activist Fellow) to focus on Malaysia’s Indigenous Orang Asli communities who are moving out of government resettlement schemes and returning to their customary lands. These lands are often exploited by the state and commercial enterprises for profit, leaving little resources for Indigenous communities.
Elroi’s investigations focused particularly on the Orang Asli struggles against logging companies. He documented the detrimental impact logging has on the local environment – and by extension on the Orang Asli’s access to land, water and food, as well as on the health of community members. Alongside his stories, he worked with community journalists to set up a digital map where various Orang Asli villages shared photos, videos and geospatial evidence of logging activity, to submit as evidence of malpractice to the authorities.
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Explore Past Projects
Bertha Challenge 2020 Fellows
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Yaşar Adnan Adanali
Yaşar developed an interactive digital archive demonstrating “hopeful” alternative solutions to housing crises around the world.
Leilani Farha
Leilani launched The Shift – a new global network of activists and progressive policy makers focused on the de-commodification of housing.
Glenda Girón
Glenda investigated the devastating link between large scale agriculture and epidemic levels of chronic kidney disease among workers and their families on plantations in Central America.
Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu
Nnaemeka produced a 10-part radio drama series telling the story of the exploitation of smallholder farmers by oil and gas companies in the Niger Delta.
Dr. Monica Magoke-Mhoja
Dr. Monica launched Women and Land – a Tanzanian campaign focussed on closing the gap between law and practice on women’s land rights.
Maeve McClenaghan
Maeve worked with an extensive network of local media outlets investigating the inaccessibility and dire lack of social housing across the UK.
Protus Onyango
Protus reported on how collusion between politicians and the land registry has led to land-grabbing and community evictions in Kenya.
Rudra Pangeni
Rudra conducted a series of investigations into how a lack of regulation and corruption has led to unaffordable and unsafe housing in Nepal.
Zsuzsanna Pósfai
Zsuzsanna brought together activists and progressive researchers to discuss responses to rising household debt – and its impact on homelessness – in Eastern and Southern Europe.
Omar Radi
Omar investigated cases of state-sanctioned land expropriation of rural communities in Morocco.
Jared Rossouw
Jared explored effective tactics activists can use to influence housing policy decisions at the local government level, culminating in an online activist educational tool.
Elfie Seymour
Elfie worked with Belfast housing activists to produce alternative public policies and plans showing progressive possibilities for social housing on public land.
Sotiris Sideris
Sotiris investigated the impact of the commodification of housing in Greece on levels of homelessness and inadequate accommodation for refugees in Athens.
Charice Starr
Charice developed popular education strategies and tools to build networks, campaigns and power for land reclamation and racial justice campaigns in the American South.
Rory Winters
Rory investigated the inadequate levels of social housing in Belfast, revealing religious disparities between housing provision.
Yaşar is an Istanbul-based urbanist, activist and researcher. He is one of the Co-founders and the Director of the Center for Spatial Justice, a non-profit working towards fairer, more democratic, ecological urban and rural spaces. Since 2010, he has been teaching participatory planning and co-housing courses at Darmstadt Technical University (Germany) as a visiting lecturer. Yaşar is a voluntary consultant for Düzce Hope Homes, the first participatory social housing project in Turkey and one of the World Habitat Awards 2017 finalists.
Through his Bertha Challenge project, Yaşar published the Hope Archive – an interactive digital map that uses video and text to document stories of housing and land justice struggles. The archive aims to showcase alternative solutions to the housing crisis from around the world.
Alongside the archive, Yaşar took advantage of the Bertha Challenge Fellowship network to produce a journal on land and housing activism. The August 2020 edition of beyond.Istanbul, guest edited by Yaşar, included contributions from four other Bertha Challenge Activist Fellows and four Bertha Challenge Investigative Journalist Fellows.
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Leilani joined the Bertha Challenge in her final year as UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, a global watchdog on housing. In the role since 2014, Leilani presented reports to the UN on homelessness, the commodification of housing and its consequences for people who are poor as well as the middle class. A lawyer by training, Leilani has worked to advance the rights of poor and marginalized groups throughout her career. She is the Executive Director of the NGO Canada Without Poverty and was instrumental in launching a historic constitutional challenge to government inaction in the face of rising homelessness in Canada.
Leilani used her Bertha Challenge Fellowship to launch a new initiative called The Shift – a global movement which calls for housing to be approached as a human right, not a commodity. As well as producing a strategy for the organization and building content for the website, Leilani also worked on a number of papers on housing provision for policy makers. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Leilani created a series of practical guidance notes and video introductions on prioritising the right to housing in government responses to the pandemic.
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Glenda is a Salvadoran journalist specializing in public health, gender equity, environmental issues, education, migration, violence and citizen participation. She has been the editor of the Sunday magazine Séptimo Sentido and part of La Prensa Gráfica since 2009 and a distinguished member of the CONNECTAS Community.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship year, Glenda investigated the shocking, but underreported, link between large scale agricultural plantations in Central America, and epidemic levels of chronic kidney disease among farmers and their families who live and work around the plantations.
Glenda’s investigation took her into rural farmlands in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica. Chronic kidney disease is now the second most common cause of death among men in Nicaragua. Within the wider region, it is estimated to have caused over 20,000 premature deaths. Glenda has worked tirelessly to make these statistics public knowledge in the Central American countries affected.
Nnaemeka is a farmer, community radio journalist and founder of The Smallholders Foundation, a rural development organization set up to inform, educate and improve the livelihood of rural small farmers, using educational radio programs. As a social entrepreneur and an outstanding communicator, Nnaemeka has received more than 30 local and international awards for his innovations that improve the yield and income of farmers.
Imo State, in south-east Nigeria, where Nnaemeka lives, contains the largest gas deposits identified to date in Africa. Gas exploration in the area has led to the forceful displacement of an estimated 25,000 smallholder farmers and their families across four communities.
During his Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Nnaemeka researched, wrote and produced a ten part radio drama series called When There Was No Land To Farm examining the relationship between oil and gas companies and the communities who live on the land that they extract from. The drama is set in Imo state, and aims to educate listeners about the exploitation of smallholder farmers to the detriment of the land and environment. Each episode was followed by a listener phone-in, where farmers could put questions about their rights to in-studio legal experts. The series was broadcast across 4 radio stations to 2 million listeners in Nigeria. It was also made available to international audiences through a dedicated website which contains the scripts and photos documenting the recording process.
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Dr. Monica Magoke-Mhoja is the Country Program Director of Landesa Tanzania, which works to secure land rights for the poorest men and women, especially in rural areas. She has more than 25 years of experience leading women’s and children’s rights programs. She is the first chairperson of Women in Law and Development in Africa –Tanzania, Founder of the Children’s Dignity Forum and, in 2007, initiated Tanzania’s first national forum to end child marriage. She is also the founder of the Women’s Legal Aid Center (WLAC) and a 2003 recipient of the American Bar Association’s International Human Rights Award for significant contribution to human rights, rule of law and access to justice.
In Tanzania, despite having some of the most progressive legislation in the region, only 16% of land is owned by women. Dr. Monica Mhoja’s Bertha Challenge project addressed the cultural and social barriers that prevent women, particularly those in rural areas, from owning land. She applied for a Bertha Challenge Fellowship to pilot an original module – ‘Mwanamke na Ardhi’ (Women and Land) – for an app called ‘Law on Your Palm’ that provides women living in remote areas with legal advice about their land rights.
During her Fellowship year, Monica trained 35 paralegals to use the app module. This training gave paralegals the ability to provide legal advice to more than 300 women, and record obstacles that women faced to rightful land ownership. The data was used to lobby policymakers to address challenges in Tanzanian law and practice around land use in the country.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Tanzania, Monica realized the potential of the app as a communication tool. At a time of confusion and anxiety, Monica and her colleagues were able to quickly adapt the app to send key health messages to rural communities. Monica also produced radio jingles to air on community radio stations to raise awareness about Covid-19, particularly its impact on women.
Following her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Monica continues to expand the project’s outreach to other parts of Tanzania.
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Maeve is an award-winning investigative journalist and founder of the critically-acclaimed podcast The Tip Off. As a journalist at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Maeve has led nationwide, collaborative investigations on issues including cuts to domestic violence refugees and politicians’ use of Facebook “dark ads”. Her year-long project counting homeless deaths prompted widespread debate, influenced national and local policy and caused the Office for National Statistics to start counting when and how people are dying homeless in the UK. Her book No Fixed Abode was published in September 2020.
Maeve’s Bertha Challenge project investigated parts of the UK housing market, unaffordable rent costs and discrimination against housing benefit claimants. At the center of her Fellowship work was a call made to local media outlets to work with TBIJ to gather information from local councils on housing needs. As a much bigger network of journalists, they were able to make the stories locally relevant, while also bringing the traction of a nation-wide investigation. TBIJ shared the data and methodology for journalists to report on the specific statistics in their area, and to solicit responses from local councils.
Maeve found that, of 62,000 available properties, only 6% would be affordable to someone receiving housing benefits. A further 90% of these ‘affordable’ properties had landlords who would not consider renting to someone receiving housing benefits. Despite this, a shortage in social housing stock has led local councils to increasingly rely on homeless people finding properties on the private market. The investigation was nominated for a Sigma Award for data journalism, and an Amnesty UK Digital Innovation Award.
Maeve exposed how councils rely on the advice of doctors employed by a single private company who make decisions about an individual’s entitlement to housing support. She found that councils have paid at least £2 million for medical assessments made by doctors who didn’t even bother to meet or talk to the individuals that they reported on. The investigation led at least one local council to change their assessment process, and a medical charity to launch a campaign against the outsourcing of medical assessments.
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Protus is a Kenyan journalist based in Nairobi with experience writing on politics, development, health, education, agriculture and environment with a specific interest in climate change. He is a green economy champion and his stories on socio-economic topics like land, water and housing have necessitated policy reviews. In 2013, Protus won an award by the Forum for African Investigative Reporters and the US based Oakland Institute to do an investigative story on land grabs in Africa. He was subsequently awarded the 2018 Journalist Grant from the Stockholm International Water Institute to attend World Water Week in Stockholm.
Protus applied for a Bertha Challenge Fellowship to investigate land grabbing in Kenya. In a country where the majority of people don’t have title deeds, many have been left vulnerable to exploitation by developers. Protus investigated the bankers, politicians and business people with political and social influence who collude with the land registry office for personal financial gain. He also drew attention to cases of smallholder and community evictions for government and private sector projects.
Kenya’s coastal regions are some of the country’s most exploited. Multinational companies have been allowed to buy up land at massively reduced and unrealistic prices, sometimes illegally. Protus investigated how members of the Digo community in Msambweni, Kwale County, have fought for land that had been claimed by a large sugar factory. He also wrote about community land that had been lost to Mombasa airport. Both stories related to cases that had been in court for ten or more years, but since publication have been resolved in favor of the affected communities
One of the themes that emerged from Protus’ stories was the disconnect between communities at risk of displacement and the politicians making planning and development decisions. He decided to use his Bertha Challenge Connect Fund to organize a training workshop for 10 local journalists, with the aim of strengthening the capacity of local journalists to amplify stories from their communities. He invited two other African-based Fellows, Dr. Monica Magoke-Mhoja, from Tanzania, and Nigerian radio journalist Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, to share their experiences of working with and advocating for the needs of rural communities.
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An investigative and data journalist from Nepal, Rudra has worked for The Himalayan Times and Republica, the leading English dailies in the country. His journalism focuses on political economy, infrastructure, foreign investments, the private sector and parliamentary affairs. He regularly writes investigative reports for The Centre for Investigative Journalism, Nepal.
During his Fellowship, Rudra conducted a series of investigations into how collusion between real estate developers, senior bank officials, and politicians have defrauded hundreds of families of their savings, pushing people into homelessness. He interviewed people affected by both rural landlessness and urban housing shortages, and published financial investigations that linked these experiences to corruption and failed government policy.
Rudra demonstrated the extent to which residential buildings are being illegally rented as office space, schools, and hospitals, including by government departments. As well as contributing to increasingly unaffordable rent in Kathmandu, this has led to buildings being dangerously overloaded and at particular risk from collapse during earthquakes.
One of his most widely read investigations revealed how both bank executives and politicians had benefited from a failed property investment scheme which had sunk the savings of hundreds of cooperative members over a ten year period. His story received widespread media attention and sparked political debate about housing development regulations.
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Zsuzsanna is an organizer and politically engaged researcher from Budapest, Hungary. She has been working on issues related to housing for more than ten years, with a focus on understanding how the financialization of housing plays out in Eastern European countries and Hungary in particular. Zsuzsanna views current housing policy as one of the key vehicles for increasing economic injustice in Hungary and is keen to find ways to stand up against this in spite of an essentially hostile political and institutional environment.
Zsuzsana’s Bertha Challenge project aimed to bridge the gap between academic research into the financialization of housing and activism on household debt. She organized an international workshop with participation from other engaged researchers and civil society organizations from eastern and southern Europe to share experiences from across the region. The discussions were documented in a research report, ‘Household debt on the peripheries of Europe: New constellations since 2008’.
Zsuzsanna subsequently organized with housing activist groups in Hungary and lawyers providing free advice on housing-related issues to instigate a collaborative research project, building on the outcomes from the international workshop.
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Location: Morocco
Forum des Alternatives Maroc (FMAS)
On 19 July, 2021, Omar Radi was sentenced to six years in prison on trumped-up espionage and sexual assault charges. The sentence came almost exactly a year after Omar was first arrested, the entire duration of which he spent in solitary confinement in Oukacha prison, Casablanca. Omar is one of a number of Moroccan journalists who have been publicly critical of the government, and subsequently been charged with sexual assault crimes.
Omar was a Bertha Challenge fellow when the Moroccan government started their relentless campaign of harassment and discreditation. His Fellowship work – investigating state sanctioned land expropriation – led him to be pursued by a government that pays scant regard to press freedom and the rule of law.
Omar studied economics and started his journalism career at a local radio station focusing on economic and financial issues. He then joined Le Journal Hebdomadaire, a weekly magazine critical of the Moroccan establishment. The publication was shut down by the Moroccan authorities after a series of trials. During the Arab Spring, Omar launched the French-speaking edition of Lakome.com, a news website that became a symbol for the movement, and was a member of Mamfakinch, a collective website focused on social movements, activism and injustice. In 2013, he was awarded first prize by the International Media Support – Association of Moroccan Investigative Journalists for a long-form series of articles about sand quarry exploitation in Morocco and the effect this had on smaller land owners. For his Fellowship, Omar investigated the use of state-sanctioned land expropriation. He organized workshops in 3 regions in Morocco, with communities who have been dispossessed of their land. This included communities who have been pressured to give away land for little compensation, only to see it re-sold to developers at 600 times the price. Omar’s investigation led him to links between Morocco’s royal family and the expropriation of community-held land for luxury development projects.
Throughout his Fellowship year, Omar was subjected to various forms of intimidation, including relentless surveillance, from the security services. On 26 December, 2019, he was given a fine and four-month suspended sentence for criticising a judge in a tweet more than six months earlier. In June 2020, Omar spoke publicly about an Amnesty International investigation that found his phone had been targeted by NSO spyware, Pegasus – the same spyware used to track and ultimately assassinate journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Between 26 June and 29 July, 2020, Omar was summoned for interrogation 12 times, with each session lasting 6-9 hours. He was ultimately jailed on 29 July on charges of espionage and rape – both of which he denies. His trial has been criticised by human rights groups in Morocco and abroad for serious failings in the proceedings, including Omar’s legal team being prevented from calling key witnesses and being denied access to evidence presented.
Omar continues to vehemently deny the charges that he has been convicted of.
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Before taking up his Fellowship, Jared was Co-Director at Ndifuna Ukwazi, an activist organization in Cape Town bringing together attorneys, organizers and researchers in campaigns to counter the powerful interests and policies that replicate spatial apartheid and inequality. He was a founder of Reclaim The City, a social movement of poor and working class people in the inner city who are resisting evictions, stopping the collusion and sale of public land to private companies and securing affordable housing in well-located areas. He has worked towards securing the first commitment since the end of apartheid to build social housing in the heart of the city, an end to relocation camps for evictees and inclusionary housing in private developments. He helped to occupy a derelict public hospital in the inner city that now supports 800 occupiers unable to afford housing in the area.
Jared began his Fellowship investigating effective activist tactics to influence housing policy on a local government level. Within the first few months he had organized a zombie march with over 200 other activists and residents calling for an end to the apartheid-like housing policies being implemented by the city government.
As the year progressed, Jared realized that the scope of his project would need to be expanded in order to effect change – to look not just at housing policy but at electoral politics in the city as a whole. He shifted his project focus to consider ways of making democractic decision making more accessible to communities affected.
Jared brought together a diverse group of activists and community leaders interested in supporting independent candidates for city council seats in Cape Town’s 2021 municipal elections. He used these discussions as the basis for a popular education handbook and accompanying website and online toolkit to share learning with other communities seeking to reclaim democratic power.
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Elfie is a human rights activist and grassroots community organizer from Belfast. She has organized with various campaigns in Britain, Ireland and Greece, for migrant and refugee rights, environmental justice and access to affordable and safe housing. Elfie’s studies in social anthropology led her to Greece to specialize in the self organization of groups responding to the refugee emergency in Athens. Since 2017, Elfie has been lead organizer with ‘Equality Can’t Wait – #BuildHomesNow’ – a campaign led by homeless families in Belfast and supported by human rights organization, PPR.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship year, Elfie worked with people affected by poor housing, architects, urban planners and finance experts to develop a sustainable social housing alternative for a site in west Belfast known as ‘Mackies’. Elfie organized a series of events called ‘Take Back the City’ which facilitated an exchange of ideas, expertise and experience, and was used to inform the development of proposals for the site. Crucially, it also led to the formation of a cross-sectorial coalition of individuals with an interest in progressing sustainable social housing in Belfast.
Throughout the year, Elfie worked with activists at Build Homes Now to organize direct actions, communications with local policy makers, and media engagement to raise the profile of the site’s potential and of the need for housing more widely in Belfast. She partnered with investigative journalist Fellow, Rory Winters, who helped to raise the profile of their campaign while writing about the need for social housing in Belfast.
In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, Elfie worked with colleagues at PPR to set up a campaign to support those most vulnerable, including people isolating in inadequate housing conditions.
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Sotiris is co-founder of AthensLive, the first English-language non-profit news outlet in Greece, and producer of The Undocumented, a podcast which aims to combat hate speech by developing a new and creative counter-narrative. Since June 2018, he has worked at the NGO, Network for Children’s Rights, as the Coordinator and been Editor-in-Chief of Migratory Birds, the first newspaper in Greece written by and for refugee, migrant and Greek youth. Previously, Sotiris was a producer and researcher for the national TV documentary series 28 Europe. Sotiris is committed to applying innovative journalism practices to help new voices emerge in public discourse.
Sotiris used his Fellowship to investigate how global financialization has displaced communities in Athens, leaving families homeless. Following a period of intense austerity and with some of the highest unemployment levels in Europe, the economic instability of the banking sector has been used to justify rocketing rates of property seizures for auction in Athens. While the ‘golden visa’ scheme has made purchasing properties in Greece more attractive to foreign investors, increasing numbers of people in Greece have been left at risk of eviction.
Sotiris also explored how the refugee emergency in Greece is directly linked to the commodification of housing. He created several short films documenting the experiences of refugees living in Athens. His 30 minute documentary called ‘Unwanted Destination’ captured living conditions in a Greek refugee camp and urban accommodation under the UNHCR’s ESTIA program.
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Charice is a popular educator and abolitionist from Alabama and Tennessee. She proudly identifies as a Black & queer Appalachian (Afrolachian). Her life and work is centered on communities of color, workers, land stewards, educators and the incarcerated.
Between 2017 and 2020, Charice worked with the Highlander Center, a regional popular education and social justice training center. She directed two cohorts of an intergenerational fellowship and projects addressing current economic and racial inequity in Central Appalachia. Previously, she educated youth on food justice and land sovereignty, as well as organized towards power shifts in Knoxville to address the current housing crisis and development that harms cash-poor communities.
Charice’s educational work confronts the structural impact of capitalism and racism, including the historic role land ownership has played – and continues to play – in the entrenchment of structural racism in the American South.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Charice developed popular education tools to build networks, campaigns and power for land reclamation in the region.
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Rory Winters
Location: United Kingdom Host Organization:
The Detail
Rory, based in Belfast, is a journalist with The Detail, an investigative news site. Previously he worked with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on their award-winning investigation into homeless deaths in the UK, as well as Belfast Live and the Sunday Business Post.
Rory used his Fellowship to investigate inadequate levels of social housing in Belfast, and the discriminatory policies and practises that have left the need for housing 26 times greater among people living in predominantly Catholic areas of the city than in historically Protestant areas.
In an interview with Rory for an article about religious disparities in housing provision, the Minister for Communities acknowledged that there are inequalities in social housing – the first time that a minister responsible for housing has made this acknowledgment since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Rory worked closely with activist Fellow, Elfie Seymour, whose campaign, ‘Build Homes Now’, calls for publicly-owned sustainable housing. Rory amplified the campaign to a wider audience, and helped to hold politicians accountable to their pre-election promises on housing provision.
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Image and Video credits: Smallholders Foundation, Participation and the Practice of Rights – Build Homes Now campaign, Reclaim the City, Elroi Yee, Sammy Richards, Jeevan Bhujel, Miki Redelinghuys & Tim Wege, Plexus Films
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