Def Jam president Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter has partnered with MTV to create a documentary titled Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life, about the global water crisis.
The new venture was announced Wednesday (Aug. 9) at a press conference at the United Nations in New York.
The legendary rapper, alongside MTV president Christina Norman, announced that he would make the documentary while traveling on his world tour.
The television segment will “document his personal learning journey as he meets children and families who suffer daily and count among the more than one billion people worldwide who do not have access to safe drinking water.”
“I’m not just going to go there and, you know, rap to them,” Jay-Z said to a packed U.N. conference room that included Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “I want to touch and help and maybe see what I can do in these areas.”
Cameras will also follow Jay-Z during his slated visits to places where environmentally-friendly solutions are in place, bringing fresh water to devastated communities.
His world tour will begin in Poland and MTV will begin filming his travels to distressed areas in Turkey.
“We’re going to address the problems of the crisis out there and we’re going to go to places where the play pumps are actually being built and see the progress of what we’re actually out there doing and we’re gonna educate people at the same time,” Carter said. “My thing is to bring awareness to the problem and to provide access.”
The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life is scheduled to premiere Nov. 24 on over 150 MTV channels and 50 local programming stations in over 179 countries.
The network has also planned to offer free access to the documentary for use by teachers, K-12 educators and librarians in 80,000 schools in America through the “Cable in the Classroom” program, as well as through Think.MTV.com website.
“I know through joining with experts through the U.N. and partnering with MTV to bring the word to our communities, we can make a difference,” Jay-Z said.