"Sucked Dry"
Foreign Investment in the Nile River Basin
with Fredrick Mugira and Annika McGinnis
Security in Context
Huge portions of land in the Nile River Basin have been acquired by foreign investors, exporting profits and resulting in the displacement of entire communities. 169,000 square kilometers have been dealt to corporations in the agriculture, forestry, renewable energy and mining industries. Investor countries include Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Israel, Norway, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the UK, and the USA, among many others. Communities in Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Kenya, Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan are negatively impacted by these land deals.
Featuring
Ugandan Fredrick Mugira is an award-winning water and climate change journalist, media trainer and development communication specialist with a wide-ranging experience. He is the director and founder of 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 GeoJournalism project that maps data on water issues in the Nile River basin and overlays them with journalism stories to promote transboundary peace. In addition, Fredrick works as an editor with Uganda’s leading multimedia house, Vision Group. A National Geographic Storytelling explorer and a Pulitzer Center Grantee, Fredrick has reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and Asia and the United States. Among his accolades are the prestigious CNN/Multichoice African Journalist award and the UN Development Journalism Award. He was shortlisted for the Energy/Water journalism Lifetime Achievement award at the Africa Utility awards 2018. He has a master’s degree in communication for development from Malmö University in Sweden. He also studied environmental journalism and communication.
Annika McGinnis is a multimedia journalist and media development specialist from the U.S., based in Uganda. With Africa Water Journalists, she is the cofounder of InfoNile.org, a geojournalism platform and journalists' network focused on data-based stories on water and environment in the 11 countries of the Nile River Basin. She has reported for Reuters, USA TODAY, and McClatchy Newspapers and is a CIVICUS Goalkeeper, Pulitzer Center and National Geographic Society Grantee. Her cross-border projects with InfoNile have won awards including Outstanding Investigative Reporting in the Fetisov Journalism Awards, Best Data Visualization in the Africa Digital Media Awards, and Top Story in the Uganda WASH Journalism Awards. She is passionate about environmental justice storytelling and data journalism.
Nayifa Nihad is a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma Norman and a Security in Context Fellow.
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