Investigating the flow of HIV aid, IWMF's HIV/AIDS reporting fellow Laura Lopez Gonzalez beat out major media outlets and broke the story of how the Global Fund to Fight HIV, TB and Malaria slashed in half funding for antiretroviral drugs in the developing world.
Gonzalez, who wrote about the funding cuts for IRIN, spent months investigating the Global Fund and discovered the world economic crisis had forced it to delay disbursement of all the funds until 2013. More than 70 percent of antiretroviral drugs in the developing world are funded by the Global Fund and in Africa, and it finances about 85 percent of TB programming.
“Because we were in contact with people who were monitoring this, we were able to get reports leaked the day of the board meeting [voting on the funding]. We were able to break it...and because we were doing so much work on it we were the first ones with case studies on how this will affect people,” Gonzalez said.
With funding from M•A•C AIDS Fund, the IWMF offered 10 South African-based reporters year-long fellowships including one-on-one coaching with media trainers and stipends to conduct interviews and in-depth research in 2011. The M•A•C AIDS Fund has donated more than $8 million to HIV/AIDS programs in South Africa in the last decade.
Another fellow, Ramatamo Sehoai discovered that there were no facilities performing medical male circumcision in the township of Alexandra, home to almost half a million people. The investigation by Sehoai, a senior reporter for Alex Pioneer newspaper, led Alexandra Health Clinic to offer circumcisions.
In reporting the story of four young men from Alexandra who had to travel 25 miles south of Johannesburg to have medical male circumcisions, he showed the need for a clinic to the NGO the Centre for HIV/AIDS Prevention Studies (CHAPS). The NGO and government came to an agreement and it took just two weeks for CHAPS to arrange to run a free medical male circumcision clinic out of Alexandra Health Clinic every Wednesday.
Sehoai also presented his story on community radio station Alex FM. “I knew that more than 200,000 males who were listening at the time, and with the ongoing story follow ups and campaigns that culminated, they are now better placed to make the crucial decision to undergo medical male circumcision,” he said.
Paula Fray of Frayintermedia, which coordinated the fellowship, said Sehoai pre-empted a need in the community and it had been translated into action. “He really did something different with the HIV/AIDS story, and I hope that he keeps us up to date,” Fray said.
Welcome Moyo, managing editor of Alex Pioneer, said that Sehoai’s investigation had a great impact on the community because he had been able to get people to speak openly about their experiences of medical male circumcision.
“I know it is becoming a cliché of some sort to get people to tell their stories and so on to make the story interesting. But for a community newspaper it is very, very crucial because the community is very close. People are scared that their neighbours are going to recognise them. It’s got a very different perspective when you talk about people talking about their stories in a community media,” said Moyo.
Finding time to concentrate on his IWMF investigation became a balancing act for Sehoai and other fellows, who needed to cover other stories for their media outlets."Now and then my attention had to be divided. If there was a strike, or a demonstration, or a shack was burning in Alexandra I had to leave the research and focus on that particular event,” Sehoai said.
Many of the IWMF fellows said that they had to do their investigations on their own time as most of them worked for busy news organizations.
Yolisa Njamela from the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) said it had been difficult initially getting the support and time off from her managers to do her TV story. But she eventually received the support of the station’s head of news, who saw the value of her work. Her piece on HIV and adolescents had been aired three times, in prime time slots.
“It was clear from the beginning that you’re going to have to take your off days, utilise them as much as you can, however, whenever we have days that are not so busy [they gave me] that day off to go off and explore and research and even shoot, if possible,” Njamela said.
Nastasya Tay from Eye Witness News (EWN) said she learned how to win people over in her newsroom to become interested in radio news features. Tay’s piece followed the story of a transgender sex worker in Johannesburg.
“I think that the skills we have learned on the fellowship have gone beyond the sort of HIV/AIDS coverage that we have done. When I was up in Somalia I would never have forced [EWN] to let me do daily online diaries, to do a narrative. And I think that was one of the highlights of our coverage from Somalia and I would never had done that outside of the fellowship. The nice thing about the fellowship is that it gives you the resources to do it,” Tay said.
Zinhle Mapumulo from the weekly City Press newspaper changed publications in the midst of her fellowship. Her initial stories on male rape in prison were published in the daily New Age. However, when she moved to the City Press, it was harder to sell her story ideas on resistance to antiretrovirals, especially in the midst of breaking political stories.
“On a daily it was easy for me to sell the stories, and for them to make the front pages. In a weekly you have the challenge that weeklies are more political and for them, unless that HIV story has a scandal in it…you really have to sell it pretty much hard,” she said.
Fray said that one of the successes of the fellowship was how the journalists had been able to take the issue of HIV/AIDS out of the health beat and incorporate it into regular reporting.
“There was a lot of happiness about the quality of the stories and the difference that the stories made in the publications, that they weren’t the run of the mill stories by and large. I think quite often when you have a programme like this there is a sense that you don’t do anything. I think one of the things that we were trying to do was to get innovative stories,” Fray said.
She added that the amount of time the journalists had invested in researching and spending time with their sources was a rare occurrence in South African journalism.
“Normally we get assigned an hour to interview a person. What we have done in this fellowship is very rare in South African journalism, which is to spend a lot of time interviewing someone,” Fray said.
Going forward Moyo said he would be happy to let Sehoai do more HIV/AIDS investigations. He admits though that with the pressures of deadlines, and having his senior reporter committed to a long-term project, did result in battles in the newsroom.
“We did have difficulties…but I think more stories like these are a very good thing. We need these types of stories, especially in our community. When you speak directly to issues affecting Alexandra instead of just South Africa it hits home like no other,” Moyo said.
Njamela too had been able to win her editors over. “Ultimately when one of the editors watched the story before it went to air he was taken aback because this was new information to him. As far as he was concerned, young people who are born with HIV don’t live that long and for him to realise that there are teenagers, 19-year-olds and 18-year-olds, at that point, he was willing to sell the story to others,” she said. |
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