Who we are and why we start 

Introduction 

One amateur, ZsuZsi Nagy decided to apply for Poynter’s News University to have a better understanding on journalism, as she would like to report on development cooperation in the future. While travelling in Central America and East Africa she entertained her friends through her blog and massive amount of e-mails sharing the experiences she gained, saw, felt in these countries. Due to the positive feedbacks and encouragements she decided to get engaged in journalism. After returning from her volunteer work in Ethiopia she published her first article in the online National Geographic Hungary. Currently she is working for an NGO in Vienna and is working on fulfilling her dreams. 

One semi-professional, Dániel Belenyi, decided to apply for the e-learning course to refine his talent and knowledge he gained through reporting his travels around the world. Backpacking in Vietnam, Cambodia, guiding mountaineers to the highest peaks of Iran, motorcycling in the Guinean jungle, covering from the riot in Cairo, only some of his reports. These experiences combined with his graphomania earned him -and his blog ”danielfromhungary”- a GoldenBlog price in 2011. Daniel is working for the Hungarian Interchurch Aid and is responsible for the fact finding missions before the projects actually get realized and is trying to „control the uncontrollable” on the scene. 

What is Poynter 

Poynter’s "Reporting and Writing About Development in the World" is a 12-week class that uses an innovative, collaborative approach to introduce the fundamentals of international development to journalists covering this broad subject area. Biweekly there are invited speakers who reveal what international development is; they introduce the improved techniques of interviewing, how to produce reports for multimedia and mobile platforms, ethics of coverage and the importance of avoiding stereotypes, etc.

To Poynter’s course 7 participant from 4 countries were selected and each participant (OK, Dani and Zsuzsi work together, but it’s still fair) will produce a Capstone Project, which will be a report, blog or website on international development that gives citizens of their home country or region relevant information on the topic.

Yes, this is the aim of this blog. 

Why WaterProjectsInEthiopia? 

Zsuzsi used to work and Dani is currently working on Ethiopian projects and over a pint of beer, these two souls figured out they both want to write about water projects in this country. So why not working on the NewsU report together? 

Dani has a good overview on the NGO’s well reconstruction and Zsuzsi is more into the business factor. Two stakeholders from two sectors (business and civil) with two different conceptions (for profit investment and non-profit development project) for the same goal can be interesting enough for comparison.