Bringing Underreported Global Health Stories To Light with the Financial Times
This post is a contribution from Juliet Riddell at the Financial Times, highlighting untold global health stories filmmakers have the power to bring to the world and showing how you can help.
After two successful short documentaries produced in collaboration with One World Media, Financial Times, and the Pulitzer Center, we’re excited to shift our focus to global health reporting, and offer a film grant for a new documentary film from the global south.
Your experience, your talent, your access, and your knowledge of stories, people, and places are essential to this collaboration. The Financial Times reports on global health issues around the world, but what can you show us that we might otherwise never see?
We’re looking for filmmakers with unique perspectives and access to untold global health stories. Your films should be timely, relevant, offer insights into the world as it is today, and speak to a broad international audience.
Film gives us a unique opportunity — not just to inform, but to care deeply. To connect with the people and places behind the headlines. To offer a rare window into the unseen.
During the filming of Chocolates Melting Away, the crew and local cacao farmers document innovative farming solutions to combat climate change’s impact on chocolate production.
Examples from our partnership
The two short documentaries produced as part of this partnership are great examples to start thinking about what kinds of stories stand out:
As of Us: Can there be a ‘just transition’ from India’s coal industry?
Pawanjot Kaur | India | 19 mins
As India transitions to clean energy, As For Us follows three individuals in the coal heartland using local solutions — fish farming in abandoned mines and reskilling coal gatherers — to drive community-led change.
Chocolates Melting Away: The fight to save Filipino chocolate
Breech Asher Harani | Philippines | 20 mins
Cacao farmers in the Philippines are using innovative solutions to fight climate change — an increasing threat to crops and livelihoods. We visit the country’s chocolate capital to see if the industry can survive.
Recent examples from FT global health reporting
Here are some recent examples from the FT on global health reporting, illustrating the kind of stories we believe deserve global attention:
Samkelo depended on USAID-backed drugs to stay alive. Then came Trump’s order
Samkelo, a young man in South Africa, represents millions who find their lifeline cut due to the sudden stop of USAID.
Inside the rise of the mental-health volunteer movement
Texas pastor Veron Blue shares her experience helping a young woman in crisis through a program equipping church members with mental health support tools.
How medical research is failing women
Studies often focus on male subjects, resulting in drugs tailored for male bodies, which can cause more adverse effects in women.
Bring your vision, your access, and your unique perspective to help us tell the global health stories that matter.
Deadline: 20 August 2025