Lukman Abdulmalik
The HumAngle Foundation has trained a new cohort of community journalists and human rights advocates from Nigeria’s Northwest under the 2025 Strengthening Community Journalism and Human Rights Advocacy (SCOJA) Fellowship, advancing efforts to improve grassroots reporting and strengthen local accountability.
Held over three days in Kaduna, the training equipped participants with essential skills in conflict-sensitive reporting, documentation of human rights violations, gender-based violence reporting, climate change coverage, and ethical storytelling.
The initiative aims to bridge the gap in media coverage of underreported communities, particularly those affected by insecurity, displacement, and social vulnerabilities.
Supported by the Netherlands Embassy, the SCOJA Fellowship forms part of HumAngle’s broader strategy to build a network of community-level reporters capable of producing high-quality, solution-driven journalism.
The program places emphasis on equipping fellows to identify early-warning signals of conflict, document abuses accurately, and report in ways that support resilience and accountability within their communities.
It also focused on improving newsroom practices by encouraging participants to mainstream trauma-sensitive and conflict-sensitive approaches in their media organizations.
This is expected to elevate reporting standards in regions where information gaps have long hindered response efforts and public understanding of local crises.
The Northwest session follows a similar workshop for North-Central fellows earlier in November, while the North-East cohort is scheduled for training from November 17–19.
It aims to develop a wider pool of community-based journalists across northern Nigeria who can collectively strengthen the visibility of rural issues and human rights concerns.
Through SCOJA, HumAngle is working to ensure that voices from marginalized and crisis-affected communities are more consistently documented and represented in national discourse.
