Four journalists working on global reporting projects and tools have been named as part of the inaugural class of Knight-Vice Innovators. The winners are funded through a collaboration between the Knight Foundation, Vice Media (first announced last December), and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and will develop their projects in New York City while studying at CUNY. This first group of winners will have full access to CUNY classes and faculty, as well as Vice’s own staffers and production facilities in Brooklyn.

The Innovators Fund was launched with a $500,000 investment from Knight and Vice “to support training for reporters from around the world to pursue and present hard-to-tell stories using new techniques and innovations.”

The 2015–2016 winners were jointly selected from a pool of more than 180 applicants by a group of judges from CUNY, Knight, and Vice.

Here are more details about those four journalists and their projects:

Guia Baggi‘s project will focus on interactive mapping and documenting of global waste routes, investigating how waste moves from developed to developing countries and its impact. Baggi is the co-founder of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy and received her Erasmus Mundus master’s in journalism, media and globalization.

Davide Mancini will develop a global, online tool for crowd-gathering sources through social networks to help journalists interview and reach the right people in the right places. He is the founder and president of VoxPop and holds a master’s degree in journalism, media and globalization from Swansea University.

Farahnaz Mohammed aims to create a platform to connect journalists who work in isolated areas, facilitating south-south cooperation in journalism. Originally from Jamaica, Mohammed holds a Master of Science in journalism from Northwestern University and a Master of Arts in Spanish and English literature from the University of Edinburgh.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu‘s project, YoungNation, is a mobile news service that distributes news to audiences in Africa. The service is designed specifically to meet the bandwidth and communication capabilities of the majority of African nations. He received a first-class honors degree in English literature from Midlands State University and was the first African to receive a master’s degree in creative writing from Trinity College in Wales.