EIF Network

Stefanie is a journalist and Youtube creator who has collaborated with several German outlets and production companies. With the support of the Google News Initiative, she founded the Youtube channel Flashlight Fish, where she focuses fully on environmental topics in producing content for independent journalists. Her past production and media partners include ZDF, Autorwerk, NDR Television, Plusminus, Financial Times Deutschland and others.

Sam Schramski has been a freelance journalist and researcher focused on climate change and socioecological conflicts for 13 years. He has contributed to various media, including radio (National Public Radio, Deutsche Welle, Radio France International) and print (Huffington Post, Nautilus, Earth Island Journal). He holds a doctorate in interdisciplinary ecology from the University of Florida and has focused the vast majority of his journalistic and academic work on issues related to climate change adaptation. Sam is also a special project coordinator at the Earth Journalism Network and a RFJ Pulitzer grantee.

Amal El Mekki is a media and communication expert from Tunisia. She is the editor-in-chief of Innsane, a storytelling platform she co-founded in May 2020. Amal is also an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, and a trainer/ mentor for Internews and other NGOs. She focuses on Human Rights and has worked with Tunisian media and international outlets. She is the first Tunisian journalist to win an access of information case against an ministry (the Interior Ministry). She has been awarded many grants from ICFJ, ARIJ, CIFAR, Candid foundation.

Alexandre has been a foreign reporter from 2014 to 2016, in Ukraine and Turkey. In 2017, he founded Politics Watch, a data-journalism project documenting corruption in the French public sphere.

Andiswa is an investigative reporter with reporting experience in the extractives and energy sectors as well as managing teams investigating environmental crimes. She currently works on several of Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism’s projects, where she tracks, monitors and investigates wildlife and other environmental crimes, as well as the status of renewable energy projects and the Just Energy Transition in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province.

Tsvetelina is a freelance GIS expert and junior researcher from Bulgaria. She is a co-founder of the EIF and a volunteer for the Bulgarian Biodiversity Foundation (BBF). She has worked on mapping, analyzing and visualizing shale gas rigs in North Africa for a cross-border investigative project financed by the Journalism Fund. She also participated to a cross-border investigation on the nefarious effects of water privatization in her hometown of Sofia. She is currently leading her own research on Forest Fires in Vitosha Mountain, with the support of the BBF.

His work focuses on civil-military relations in the Middle East and North Africa. He has contributed to projects which present the intertwined relations of Egypt’s military generals and businessmen across kinship and benefit-based networks. He studied investigative journalism at RNTC Media Training Centre in the Netherlands. He has published several investigations on human rights, Illicit financial flows and Corruption.He has worked on projects that use data for positive social change with DATA4CHANGE. He was part of an Egyptian-French cross-border investigation team in cooperation with CIFAR.

Freelance journalist since 2016, Aïssatou creates content for various platforms and online media, and currently serves as an assistant editor for the African section of the GIJN (Global Investigative Journalism Network). Moreover, sensitive to environmental issues, she has been campaigning for the environmental cause for several years, through her writings and by participating in activities dealing with these issues. This commitment led her to co-create April 2022, a news website, L’Écologiste, dedicated mainly to environmental issues. Aïssatou was also a Media Grantee granted by the Arican Union in 2022, the year she joined the GIJN team.