The African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME) runs a Grant for Investigative Journalism in Uganda.

The central aim of this Grant is to ensure that high quality investigative stories appear in the Ugandan media more regularly. The Grant Fund targets individual journalists, selected through a competitive process, to pursue promising ideas and produce well reported and well written stories over a specified period of time. Media houses will be requested to participate by allowing their journalists time off to report and write compelling stories about the key issues of our times.


ACME also provides pre-publication advising and mentoring, and will maintain a regularly updated database of investigative story ideas. This project will be broadened to cover East Africa after an initial one-year pilot in Uganda.

Specific Objectives

1. To promote and strengthen probing media coverage of public issues.
2. To promote and strengthen in-depth and critical reporting on key public issues that are rarely covered in the mainstream media.
3. To encourage and support interested journalists to pursue enterprise and investigative reporting.
4. To provide reporting tools for investigative journalists.
5. To provide a database of investigative story ideas.
6. To publish and showcase local examples of good investigative reporting.

Target Beneficiaries

The beneficiaries will be Ugandan journalists, including those employed directly by media houses and others working independently or as freelancers or stringers.

How the Grant Works

• Access to Grant money will be open to all journalists in Uganda.
• Interested journalists are required to write a short proposal stating the subject they want to report on and why; the time it is likely to take; the cost; and the steps to be taken in the reporting.
• If the journalist is employed, his or her media house is required to provide a written undertaking granting the journalist time off to pursue the investigative project and to run the story once ready.
• Grants range from USD500 to USD2,000.
• The investigative fellows or stories to be funded are selected by an independent panel managed by ACME.
• In selecting the fellows and stories to be funded, the committee will be guided by clear criteria, which will also be available to all journalists wishing to enter the competition.
• While journalists are free to come up with their own original ideas, ACME will also run a regularly updated database of story ideas.
• ACME editors will provide pre-publication advising and mentoring.
• ACME editors will edit the final stories.
• Completed stories will be published on the ACME website and any media house will be free to publish the same or edited version of the same stories.

Funding

The initial Funding for the Investigative Reporting Grant has been provided by ACME founders Peter G. Mwesige and Bernard Tabaire.

Individuals who are interested in seeing more investigative and enterprising reporting on key public issues are encouraged to donate towards the Grant.
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