- Mongabay is launching a bilingual news bureau, Mongabay Africa, to cover environmental and conservation news across the continent in French and English.
- The bureau will support original reporting on wildlife conservation, development pressures, natural resource industries, and climate change impacts in Africa.
- This expansion aligns with Mongabay’s efforts to provide credible independent journalism, make science accessible, elevate voices impacted by environmental change, and serve a diverse audience with free news in various languages and formats.
In 2023, Mongabay is officially expanding its coverage of environmental and conservation news in Africa by launching a news bureau dedicated to producing our renowned and award-winning brand of journalism in both French and English.
The new bureau, Mongabay Africa, will create original reporting on issues relevant to the conservation of Africa’s wildlife and their habitats, development pressures and the activities of natural resource industries, and the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and communities across the continent.
Like other Mongabay bureaus, Mongabay Africa will produce journalism under an open Creative Commons license, allowing other outlets to republish our content commercially or non-commercially at no cost, leading to greater spread of environmental news across the continent.
Expanding journalist capacity in Africa
This new bureau comes with new job openings to build the Mongabay Africa team and meet our comprehensive coverage goals. This is similar to Mongabay’s process of establishing other regional bureaus worldwide.
The first hire was Mongabay Africa program director David Akana, who will oversee and manage Mongabay Africa’s operations in a high-impact leadership role.
Additionally, there are currently three staff positions open:
A step toward greater global reach
Mongabay’s expansion notably accelerated since shifting to a nonprofit model 11 years ago with the launch of Mongabay Indonesia, our Indonesian-language environmental news service. This in turn paved the way for Mongabay Latam, which has covered all of Spanish-speaking Latin America since its launch in 2016.
Since then, Mongabay added Mongabay India in 2018, expanding its capacity to do original reporting in Hindi in 2020. In 2019, Mongabay also established a news desk dedicated to reporting in Brazilian Portuguese. By revealing the evidence of ecosystem destruction and its consequences on people worldwide, these bureaus continue to make a demonstrable impact, creating opportunities to hold those responsible to account.
Adding Mongabay Africa supports the nonprofit’s belief that credible independent journalism is essential to successfully address the twin planetary emergencies of biodiversity loss and climate change, because sharing knowledge through stories can inform, inspire and sustain effective action worldwide. This vision includes making science accessible and elevating the voices and knowledge of people directly impacted by environmental change. In addition, it helps serve a diverse audience by providing free access to news and information in numerous languages and formats to address knowledge gaps and improve transparency.
Banner image: A cheetah in Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
See all our current Africa coverage here, like this new report:
Community forest association helps hold the line to protect Mount Kenya forest