By Marsha Aida, Programme Manager, Gender, Governance & Accountability, Baraza Media Lab
I should tell you upfront that this piece almost didn’t get written. On the travel day, the 31st of August, the KAA and KCA strike grounded our entire team at JKIA, and for 18+ hours, it looked like this convening, like so many climate stories in Uganda, simply wasn’t going to reach where it needed to go. The group chat looked less like convening logistics and more like a small-scale crisis simulation.
Then, somehow, we landed. And on the morning of 2 September, more than 100 people walked into the Golden Tulip in Kampala to spend a day debating, discussing and arguing about whether Uganda frontline climate stories are unheard or misheard and why.
It sounds like a small distinction. It is not. Unheard means a story never reached anyone at all. Misheard means it reached someone, just not as the truth, but some other, more convenient version got there first. Two very different diagnoses, two very different prescriptions.
Our Research Manager, Marion Anvango, opened the session by grounding the room in the data. The findings that set the tone for everything after it was this: Uganda doesn’t have a knowledge problem. Her team had traced 156 organisations across six pillars of the country’s climate information ecosystem, and the capacity was all there, ACODE doing the policy research, PesaCheck doing the fact-checking, ACME and InfoNile doing the climate journalism itself. What wasn’t there was a way for any of it to travel. Seven gaps, as she presented, stood between good information and the people who needed it: no one translating technical data into something a public could actually use, no way to verify a claim fast enough once someone started calling it “anti-development,” or “political tool”, coverage that thinned out the moment you left Kampala, almost nothing in local dialect. She illustrated it with a WhatsApp flood panic that had gone viral days earlier, debunked by the Ministry well after it had already changed what people planted. Official science, moving at official speed, had lost.
Then three voices from Uganda-based organisations took the floor in quick succession, each from a different vantage point: CliMedia, on where these stories actually surface online and who’s watching; Agape Earth Coalition, on what the frontline looks like long before a journalist ever calls; and the Uganda Editors Guild, on what happens at the gate, and who decides what doesn’t get through it.
“When a story like this doesn’t run, whose decision was that, really?”
“Do audiences or the general public really care enough about climate stories?”
Then we came into the real agenda. Six groups, each mixing journalists, content creators, activists, and CSO and Indigenous Peoples’ representatives, went after the same question from six different angles. One group insisted climate stories matter because they turn a distant scientific problem into an immediate, human one. Another concluded, bluntly, that amplification is not adequate, that climate reporting still loses out to political news on a slow week. A third named what’s missing entirely: Indigenous knowledge treated as evidence, not decoration; communities allowed to narrate their own stories instead of being spoken about.
Unheard or Misheard? Group Discussions
One group traced the specific chain of things that keep a story from travelling, are gatekeeping, translation, funding interests, and plain exhaustion from being interviewed one too many times with nothing to show for it. Another asked why even a well-reported story can still produce no action, and landed on something I haven’t stopped thinking about since: accuracy is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A story also has to be reachable, understandable, and tethered to someone who can actually act. Packaging is indeed everything.
By the closing plenary, four of six groups chose misheard, as pertains to climate stories. One group decided they were unheard. The remaining group, refusing to pick a side, claimed both.
Unheard or Misheard? Peer discussion sessions
We also broke down the two USD 5,000 grants we are offering as part of this project. One grant is specifically for climate disinformation content creation, and the other is for an Indigenous Peoples’ or CSO organisation doing frontline work. They are all built for people already doing this work who need the resource boost. We will be offering these grants in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
What stays with me from Kampala isn’t any single finding. It’s the shape of the discussion itself. Journalists sitting across from the activists they usually only quote, editors hearing directly from the communities while fighting gate keeping allegations and breaking down their processes,, all of them mapping the same fracture from different sides of it. Government executives who got caught in the debate heat, student journalists who brought fresh perspectives into the conversation… Nobody in that room fully agreed with anybody else. Good. That disagreement is the raw material we came for. Of most importance, they all agreed that for their collective efforts in capturing and publishing climate stories to be effective, they needed to work together and not in silos.
Uganda was the opening chapter. Kenya is next, and Tanzania follows right after that. With a regional convening to tie it all together. If Kampala taught us anything, it’s that the stories are already being told. The work now is making sure they actually land.
Baraza Media Lab delivers this convening series in partnership with International Media Support (IMS), under the Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI). Applications for the Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania grants officially closed on the 28th of September 2026 with disbursement of funds expected by mid-October.