Through the support of the CatchLight Fellowship Award in 2018 Aida Muluneh provided training and mentorship to photographers in Ethiopia and Cote d’Ivoire over the course of a year. This was in line with Aida’s dedication to educating and mentoring a crop of future African photographers and storytellers. The collaboration with CatchLight emphasized the importance of photojournalism as a gateway for not only training and professionalizing future photographers but also ensuring that they have work and contribute to shaping how the African continent presents itself and is seen.

The 2020 round of the Catchlight Africa Mentorship Program will build upon the community and success of the first round launched in 2018. 2020 is a fitting year to scale up what was seeded then. 2020 is an important moment in history to document and yet again there aren’t enough images and stories to come out of the continent with an African lens. To roll out the program we will be working closely with the cultural institutions that are the Fondation Donwahi in Cote d’Ivoire and DFA in Ethiopia.