Two partners to implement OCRI in Brazil

The Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) is partnering with two Brazilian organisations to implement the Open Climate Reporting Initiative (OCRI) in year two. The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) and Open Knowledge Brasil (OKBR) will deliver activities that consist of training, reporting grants and conference workshops for at least 270 journalists, NGO communicators, and researchers.

Abraji is an NGO supporting investigative journalists in Brazil for over two decades. It has more than 10,000 people trained and several projects in different areas, such as advocacy, fact-checking, local journalism, open data and transparency, OSINT, data science, and tools to aid journalistic investigations. With CIJ’s support, the association will implement three activities by January 2024: a training at the 18th International Congress of Investigative Journalism in São Paulo, an in depth training for environmental journalists with a focus on climate change planned to hold in Belém and a post-training support (through a reporting grant and mentoring) for the execution of climate change investigative stories.

Open Knowledge Brasil (OKBR) is a local chapter of the international Open Knowledge network established in Brazil since 2013 to promote the usage of open data, technologies and training materials to handle public data, free software and open-source community in civic technology projects. OCRI and OKBR will carry out a series of activities that includes a track of workshops on climate change at the Coda Amazônia Conference, a Climate Data Lab in partnership with a grassroots organisation in the Northern region of Brazil, as well as five training sessions at Coda.Br Conference.

Both partners aim to improve the quality and quantity of reporting on climate change in Brazil and collaborate to help environmental activists and advocates work more effectively with public data and evidence-driven public policies for the climate, especially in the Legal Amazon region. The announcement of how to engage in those activities will be released soon.