Carleton journalism students head to Africa on “life-changing” media internships

For the 20^th year in a row, some of Carleton’s top journalism students are gearing up to head to Africa on media internships this spring and summer.

This year’s iteration of the longstanding Global Journalism Internship program will see seven students from Carleton’s Bachelor of Journalism and Master of Journalism programs take up 8-12 week internships in Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda or Zambia with the Canadian organization Farm Radio International. Students will collaborate with local partners to produce podcasts and other works of journalism documenting local solutions to climate change.

Carleton’s Global Journalism Internships unfolding this year are the continuation of a program that has been in operation since 2006 and has sent more than 300 Carleton journalism students to the Global South to take up media internships.

“These internships have provided life-changing opportunities for many of our students as a capstone to their time at Carleton,” said Allan Thompson, the founder of the internship program and currently the Director of Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication. “Over two decades, I have made it my mission to keep these internships going because of the remarkable life experience they offer for our students,” Thompson said.

Working with Farm Radio partners on the ground, the Carleton interns will identify and plan for podcast stories and undertake field travel to rural communities to record video, audio and photography, with a focus on audio. In the end, they will work on the editing and production of podcast episodes, as well as video and written stories.

The Carleton internships were originally an offshoot of the partnership Carleton forged in 2006 with the journalism school at the National University of Rwanda, the Rwanda Initiative project that operated from 2006 to 2012 fostering journalism education and independent media in post-genocide Rwanda. Over the first few years of the program, all of the Carleton interns took up placements with Rwandan media outlets.

But even after the Rwanda partnership wound down, the internships continued, in partnership with several other organizations across Africa, including Farm Radio International.

For the last three years, Farm Radio’s work on the On Air project has been the primary focus of the Carleton internships, producing the Nature Answers podcast that shares stories from rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, where some of the most vulnerable people on earth are turning to nature for solutions to a changing climate.

You can listen here to some of the podcast episodes from Season 3 of On Air.

This year’s Carleton interns include:

• Abyssinia Abede, a third-year undergraduate in journalism who will be travelling to Côte d’Ivoire;
• Madison Eldridge, who is graduating this year from Carleton’s Bachelor of Journalism program, is going to Uganda;
• Claire Hutcheon, who is graduating from Carleton’s MJ program, heads to Zambia.
• Raquel Medina, who has just completed the first year of Carleton’s MJ program, is traveling to Zambia;
• Caelan Monkman, who is graduating from Carleton’s MJ this year, is also headed to Zambia;
• Alex Scott, who has just completed the first year of Carleton’s MJ program, takes up a placement in Côte d’Ivoire;
• Victor Vigas Alvarez, who is graduating from Carleton’s BJ program, is traveling to Uganda.

Farm Radio’s mandate since its creation in 1979 has been to use radio as a vehicle to achieve development goals and to explore how to get people to listen to useful programming that brings about change. Various Farm Radio projects over the years have focused on farming, gender equality, sexual health and mental health. The focus on radio as a medium has expanded to include another important media platform – the mobile phone.

The Carleton interns recently underwent a two-day orientation exercise at Farm Radio, led by the organization’s communications manager Tara Sprickerhoff.

Sprickerhoff knows Carleton’s overseas internships well because her career was launched by a Carleton internship she took up with Farm Radio in Ghana, back in 2015.

“I literally wouldn’t be working for Farm Radio International today if I hadn’t done Carleton’s internship abroad,” Sprickerhoff said. “As a young journalist, having the experience working with, and telling stories about, people on the other side of the world was something I never would have gotten to do otherwise.”

Farm Radio’s On Air project is funded in part by Global Affairs Canada. Carleton’s travel awards that fund these internships are supported by contributions from the Reader’s Digest Foundation and also from the journalism program’s Kesterton endowment.

Sunday, May 4, 2025 in General, Journalism News, News
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