How do we fight for change when the money runs out?

Hey there,

Before we get started – and I promise it’s the last time I’ll ask! – TBIJ is just about to finish up its annual survey. If you can spare five minutes, I’d really appreciate it.

Sometimes the timing of things is just right. You get to your stop just as the train or bus is pulling in; a string of traffic lights all turn green, seemingly just for you; you make it home just as the heavens open.

When the Bureau launched its global health team in March 2020 there was a similar kind of coincidence, albeit a much less pleasant one. In the week the team officially launched, news of a worrying pneumonia coming out of China made its way across the world. Yes, our global health team started the same time as the Covid-19 pandemic did.

In a way, it was perfect timing. How better to show the importance of deep, evidence-based investigations than to apply them to the biggest global health emergency in living memory? The team spent its first two years doggedly investigating coronavirus around the world. That award-winning work – exploring access to medicines, drug supply chains and global inequality in health systems – set the stage for the team’s work to this day.

Earlier this year, I told you about how that work helped secure access to medical oxygen for people across the world. And there’s so many stories of real, positive change from the team’s work that I have left to tell.

The launch of the health team was supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The philanthropic organisation has continued to fund our work in this area since – but sadly, it no longer will after our current grant ends at the end of the year.

Unfortunately, we are far from the only newsroom or media organisation affected by the Foundation’s change in priorities. I spoke to Megan Clement about one newsletter that has had to close after it also lost its Gates funding.

“I have been covering women’s rights as a journalist mostly full time since around 2017 when I ran News Deeply’s women and girls platform.

Then I went freelance and kept a very strong focus on women’s rights and gender equality, including a big investigation for Al Jazeera on femicide in France. In 2021, Rebecca Amsellem – the founder of Gloria Media – approached me to run Impact, which was their new newsletter that covered feminist movements around the world in French and in English.

We worked with reporters around the world and produced a monthly round-up of everything that was happening in women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights around the world written by my colleague, Agustina Ordoqui, based in Argentina.

We did on the ground reportage working with freelancers everywhere – from Latin America, Asia, Africa. We tried to cover the world from a feminist perspective, which is not something that gets done very often.

One of my favourite stories that we did was about the Aurat March, which is this extremely radical feminist movement in Pakistan. On 8 March, International Women’s Day, women and trans people take to the streets, taking on the military and breaking through barbed wire with their bare hands, very forcefully demanding change.

And I love that story because it’s such a contrast from what we usually hear in the Global North about the situation of women and girls in Pakistan, which is very serious. But this wasn’t about all these poor women who are victims of “honour killings”, this is like, here are these really radical feminists, and they’ve had to become very radical because the situation is so bad.

We were trying to uncover interesting feminist movements that were making change. And that's why Latin America was such a big focus for us. We looked at how Colombia decriminalised abortion and went from basically having an abortion ban to some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world. 

We did a lot on the Polish feminists who’ve not just been fighting to try and overturn Poland’s terrible abortion legislation, but how they were making sure that women in Ukraine who were fleeing the war were able to get reproductive healthcare as well.

I have an obsession with football, and recently Esther Appiah-Fei, a great football journalist, did a story about fighting for intersex players’ rights in Kenya. We also covered trans women being banned from football in the UK.

Our biggest goal in reporting on feminism was telling people something they didn’t already know. And because women's rights and queer rights are so poorly covered in the mainstream media, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit.

The other big goal for me was to have this playbook so that someone sitting in France, who reads about, say, an anti-gender-based violence campaign in Argentina, can learn from those tactics and apply them in their home context. The great thing about having a newsletter is people will just hit reply. Many said, “I did not know that”, and some said, “I’m going to use this, thank you!”

It was also about showing solidarity. When we had legislative elections here in France, in 2024, we did a lot of reporting around what the consequences of far-right governments are for women. We interviewed feminists who had all experienced living under the far right and being activists, including someone from Brazil, someone from Argentina, someone from Hungary to share what they learned. It was giving people tools and also showing that even if in your own domestic context you feel alone, you’re not.

At the start of this year, the Gates Foundation got in touch to say it wouldn’t be renewing our funding, which means that our entire newsletter, with the exception of a supplement called The Evidence, is no longer supported. 

I haven’t had a conversation with the Foundation myself, but it seems that gender equality media reporting is no longer a priority. They have since announced this big investment in women’s health – but I don’t see how you meaningfully improve health without also challenging underlying social norms and you need journalism to do that.

The timing couldn’t be worse. We do not need to go into all of the ways that the Donald Trump presidency has a deleterious effect on women, gender-diverse people and queer communities. There’s a huge amount of disinformation about reproductive rights, about women's rights, about trans healthcare going on. We have a rising far right in Europe. Add to this biased AI and it’s a catastrophic time to pull out of high-quality gender equality reporting.

However, journalists don’t make funding decisions. As long as we have this very fragile media ecosystem that’s relying on crumbs from philanthropists, we’re all going to be at risk of this happening to us. I think it’s a great shame.

In 21st-century journalism, we do the work we’re passionate about and that we care about for as long as it’s possible. And then we find another way to do it. So I will find another way to keep reporting these stories because they’re not going away.”

“Follow the money” is one of the adages of investigative journalism. And it applies to journalism as much as any other industry – who pays for your journalism matters. By being funded by a range of organisations, the Bureau can remain independent and stay free to investigate and say what we want.

But it’s hard. Our dedicated but small fundraising team spends a lot of time and energy finding charities, philanthropies and other organisations who might fund our award-winning work. It’s competitive too – there is generally less and less money available for journalism, so more newsrooms are competing for it.

We don’t want to put our work behind a paywall or become beholden to shareholders or rich owners telling us what to do. So that’s why we launched our community of supporters in 2023. You can become one of our Bureau Insiders by donating to our work monthly – click the button below to find out more.

Take care,