Climate and impact storyteller Michael Dzidzorm Banahene has received the Best TV Production Storytelling Award under Ghana’s 2026 Youth Climate Reporters Programme, recognising his use of visual storytelling to bring community-level climate realities to national attention.
The award was presented at the Youth Climate Reporters National Dialogue on 21 May 2026 at the JoyNews studios in Accra.
The national event brought together young climate reporters, researchers, media practitioners and development actors to explore how climate change is being experienced across communities in Ghana.
The Youth Climate Reporters Programme was led by the Africa Climate Collaborative at the University of Ghana and the Climate and Development Knowledge Network Ghana, in collaboration with partners including JoyNews, YEFL-Ghana and Beyond the Science.
More than 200 young people from across Ghana participated in training focused on climate storytelling across television, radio, editorial and digital media.
One Kilometre, Two Realities Michael received the award for his climate story, “Just One Kilometer Away.”
Produced in Northern Ghana, the film explores two farming communities separated by only a short distance but experiencing remarkably different agricultural realities.
At Botanga, access to irrigation allows farmers to continue producing beyond the rainy season.
Nearby, farmers who depend primarily on rainfall face a much narrower production window, leaving their livelihoods more exposed to increasingly unpredictable weather conditions.
Rather than approaching climate change through statistics and technical terminology alone, Just One Kilometer Away places farmers and their lived experiences at the centre of the story.
Through interviews, farm scenes and visual comparisons, the film asks a simple but important question:
What difference can access to water make in a farmer’s ability to adapt to a changing climate?
The story connects climate adaptation to issues that are immediately tangible to rural households — productivity, income, food production and the ability to continue farming when rainfall becomes unreliable.
Telling Climate Stories Through People
For Michael, the recognition forms part of a growing body of work focused on agriculture, climate resilience and community storytelling in Northern Ghana.
His approach is grounded in documenting climate change through the people experiencing it: farmers adjusting their production systems, women navigating challenges in agriculture, young people building livelihoods and communities developing their own responses to environmental change.
Just One Kilometer Away follows that same philosophy.
Rather than presenting communities simply as victims of climate change, the film explores both vulnerability and adaptation — showing what becomes possible when people have access to resources that strengthen their resilience.
The result was a story that earned the Best TV Production Storytelling Award at the culmination of the Youth Climate Reporters Programme.
From Community Stories to National Conversations
The Youth Climate Reporters initiative was created to strengthen the ability of young people to produce evidence-based, community-driven climate stories and contribute to Ghana’s climate conversation.
At the National Dialogue, selected stories from across the country were brought onto a national platform, with recognition spanning television, radio, social media, editorial writing, human-interest storytelling and the use of evidence in climate reporting.
For Michael, having a story developed from the realities of farmers in Northern Ghana recognised on a national stage reinforced the importance of taking cameras, microphones and climate conversations beyond conference rooms and into communities.
“For me, climate storytelling begins with the people living the reality. When we listen carefully and tell those stories with dignity, we make climate change easier to understand, harder to ignore and more connected to everyday life.”
— Michael Banahene
More Than an Award
The recognition marks another step in Michael’s continuing work at the intersection of strategic communication, documentary storytelling, agriculture and climate action.
For Glowgh Multimedia, it also reflects the power of visual storytelling to document issues that matter — not simply by reporting what is happening, but by bringing audiences closer to the people living those realities.
And perhaps the central message of Just One Kilometer Away remains its simplest:
Sometimes, the distance between vulnerability and resilience can be just one kilometre — and access to the right resource.
Story: Glowgh Multimedia
Storytelling & Production: Michael Dzidzorm Banahene
Location: Northern Ghana
Award: Best TV Production Storytelling Award
Programme: 2026 Youth Climate Reporters Programme
Michael Banahene Wins Best TV Production Storytelling Award for Climate Storytelling
