Five Digital Content Creators and Journalists Announced for the G20 Fellowship – Voices for Land

UNCCD and One World Media are proud to announce the five digital content creators and journalists selected for the G20 Fellowship – Voices for Land, a new initiative to support original storytelling on land degradation and ecosystem restoration.

Land is being degraded worldwide at a rapid pace — a result of human-induced actions that exploit land, causing its utility, biodiversity, soil fertility and overall health to decline. Yet the communities most impacted by this crisis, and their stories, remain critically underreported. This Fellowship aims to change that.

Through up to USD $6,600 in production funding, one-to-one mentoring, workshops and editorial support, fellows will translate complex land degradation and restoration data into compelling campaigns. Reaching audiences across TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, they will be supported at every stage, from planning through to completion, with guidance on how to strategise and effectively engage both local and global audiences.

The programme will support the following cohort of five digital content creators and journalists:

Eric Kawa (Sierra Leone) — climate resilience and environmental storytelling
Lilan Dayananda (Sri Lanka) — social impact and sustainable land use
Radhika Gupta (India) — community voices and environmental art
Reyhab Watari (Kenya) — agricultural innovation and land restoration
Jaya Setiawan Gulö (Indonesia) — making land degradation stories accessible to young people

Together, their work will bring the human and environmental cost of land degradation into focus, while inspiring action towards a more sustainable and restored future.

“The G20 Fellowship – Voices for Land reflects our shared commitment to ensuring that stories about land degradation are told in creative and new ways, centring the voices of communities across the world it impacts most. By supporting these five fellows from Sri Lanka, Kenya, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and India with funding, mentorship and editorial guidance, we hope to inspire both local and global audiences to understand, care about, and take action on land degradation.”

— Chinwe Kalu-Uma, Interim Director, One World Media

About UNCCD

The UNCCD is the global voice for land. We promote practices that avoid, reduce and reverse land degradation and are the driving force behind Sustainable Development Goal 15 and Land Degradation Neutrality.

The ambition of the G20 Global Initiative on Reducing Land Degradation and Enhancing Conservation of Terrestrial Habitats (G20 Global Land Initiative) is to achieve a 50 per cent reduction in degraded land by 2040. The Initiative, which was launched in 2020, under the G20’s Saudi Arabia Presidency, is hosted by United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification based in Bonn, Germany. The G20 Fellowship – Voices for Land is funded by UNCCD’s G20 Global Land Initiative.

About One World Media
One World Media exists to support digital content creators and journalists reporting on the world’s most underreported stories from the Global South. By investing in, celebrating, and connecting diverse talent, we are changing who gets to tell the world’s stories and how they’re told. In doing so, we are shifting power, challenging stereotypes, and changing narratives to shape a more representative global media landscape.