Mentoring Arab Journalists to Cover Education

With the help of a colleague, I applied for a grant from the UN Democracy Fund with the goal of improving the coverage of education in Arab publications. The project ran from 2013 to 2015.

In the project, Al-Fanar Media, the bilingual publication about Arab education that I led, ran two workshops in Istanbul to encourage and equip Arab journalists to write about education. Six senior journalists worked as mentors, both in the workshops and online, with 58 Arab reporters, who came from every Arab League country except Djibouti and Comoros. Within a year of the workshops, the Arab journalists had written more than 200 stories about education. Some of those articles were about the difficulties many Arab populations had in accessing education, including young deaf Egyptians, rural Lebanese women, and the stateless residents of Kuwait known as “Bedoon”. 

At time when the Islamic State governed a wide swath of Iraq, an Iraqi reporter wrote a chilling article about “The Islamic State’s Plan for Universities.” A collaboration between a Syrian reporter and one of our staff writers produced the powerful story “To be Syrian and a Professor: Recipe for Tragedy.” 

Two investigative pieces the Arab reporters wrote revealed the lack of schoolbooks in Mauritania and the absence of bathrooms in schools in Basra, Iraq. 

In summary, I was enormously proud of the depth and variety of coverage produced by the journalists who participated in the workshops. Many of the reporters cite the workshops as a turning point in their career and continue to write insightful stories on education today. An open-source curriculum developed in both Arabic and English on education journalism for the project is freely available to all who want to use it. (Contact me if you would like a copy.) A private Facebook group started by Arab journalists attending the workshop is still active, and the journalists continue to exchange tips and articles about education journalism.