Africa's premier investigative journalism conference kicks off in South Africa

South Africa: The 18th African Investigative Journalism Conference began on Monday, October 31, 2022, at the Wits Centre for Journalism in South Africa, with Conference Convener, Anton Harber, urging delegates to take full advantage of the event to learn and network.

Harber said this year's conference was particularly significant because it is the first since the Covid-19 pandemic, and it has been larger and better than ever before.

Soon after Harber's speech, Peter Murimi and Njeri Mwangi of BBC Africa Eye highlighted some of their outstanding recent work.

The Kenyan team's award-winning films - The Baby Stealers and Forced to Beg - were presented by Peter, Development Executive Producer, BBC Africa Eye, and Njeri, BBC, AFRICA EYE, investigative reporter.

According to the duo, the investigations had an impact because arrests were made and the films were used as evidence.

Harber's welcome and keynote speech, as well as a presentation by BBC Africa Eye film-makers highlighting some of their remarkable recent work, were followed by some break-out sessions, as is customary at the conference.

Jeff Kelly-Lowenstein, Executive Director of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), and his team, which included Yuxi Wang, Murtala Abdullahi, Head of Armed Violence and Climate Security reporting, and HumAngle, participated in one of these breakout sessions.

CCIJ has broken new ground in that area, according to Jeff, Esther, and Murtala, by purchasing a plot of land in the metaverse in 2021 and launching two separate investigations there.

Hum Angle, a Nigeria-based journalism organisation with whom CCIJ collaborated earlier this year on a story about the effects of increased desertification levels in northern Nigeria, contributed to the CCIJ session.

Attendees were able to explore CCIJ's immersive metaverse space, which included immersive, data, and visual elements.

Other morning sessions included presentations by Sandrine Sawadogo, Investigative Journalist, Catherine Gicheru, AWJP, Director Motunrayo Famuyiwa-Alaka WSCIJ, Executive Director/CEO, and Adenike Aloba, Dataphyte, Managing Editor on "Mainstreaming women's voices in investigative reporting."

Nixon Kariithi, CEO of Tangaza Africa Kenya, and Arnold Segawa, Economics Researcher/Scholar at Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, presented on the topics "Investigating trade flows." The power of Trademap in big data analysis and financial and business investigation."

According to the two, Big Data strategies can include audience analytics and tools to understand public and private databases for journalistic storytelling, managing and searching the exploding amount of video, social media, and other content, targeting advertising and ad campaigns, automating the production of text and video stories, identifying waste and enabling efficiencies, and much more.

They addressed the key question: Are newsrooms using it?

Risdel Kasasira, Senior Reporter, East African Centre for Investigative Reporting, Carol Kasujja, Multimedia Journalist, New Vision, and Manasseh Azure Awun, Editor-in-Chief, The Fourth Estate gave a presentation on "Investigating Health Crimes."

They essentially presented three disparate case studies: blood selling in Uganda, patient rights abuse in Nigeria, and sexual abuse of patients in Ghana. Speakers will discuss how they created their stories, as well as tips and suggestions for those just starting out.

Technology can transform a small newsroom, allowing it to do significantly more and better journalism than ever before.

In this session, the two discussed how small newsrooms can use technology to give their teams more reporting power by using a variety of tools ranging from automating data collection to beginning to automate stories.

For guidance, case studies were included.

Together with Fisayo Babatunde Soyombo, Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Scrolla.Africa, Everson Luhangafor, Editor at Large of Scrolla.Africa, and Anonymous, Freelance Undercover Journalist, gave a presentation on the critical topic: "Undercover journalism - its potential and risks."

Undercover journalism has produced excellent stories, but it is fraught with danger, both physical and ethical.

Anas and his co-presenters described their experiences, including one who was sold as a slave in Dubai and later exposed to child brides sold into Rwanda.

Attendees learned about the complexities and nuances of undercover reporting.

The Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism in South Africa published COVID cases and vaccination data in the form of daily maps for over 800 days of the pandemic.

Sounds easy, right? Nope.

The two informed attendees that the entire newsroom would be divided into teams that would work in shifts, with one member entering data and their teammate checking their work.

They said that spreadsheet formulas aided their extensive accuracy-checking process and enabled us to detect errors in health department numbers.

They asked: “We had to teach each other about graphic design and a bit of algebra while working irregular hours to get the maps out by 9 am each morning. What have we learned and what will we do differently the next time around?”

They shared their lessons and processes so that other media organisations could report on data in the event of the next pandemic.

Deokaran was a dedicated civil servant who was murdered after reporting R850 million in corrupt payments from a poor state hospital.

According to Jeff, News24 obtained 60 000 Gauteng Department of Health e-mails and the contents of Deokaran's cellphone, which resulted in the Silenced series, which made her murder unavoidable.

He unpacked the question: "Where do you start when confronted with a mountain of documents and data? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? ”

Pinpoint assists journalists in discovering stories hidden beneath massive amounts of documentation and discovering correlations between related terms.

Ken's training session demonstrated how Pinpoint has been used in investigative journalism before guiding participants through the process of signing up for and creating a Pinpoint account, creating and uploading documents, searching for and finding related terms, and demonstrating features such as audio transcription and handwriting conversion to editable text.

They used pioneering geo-journalism tools (#WildEye, #MineAlert, Rhino Court Cases, and ClimaTracker) to demonstrate how journalists can incorporate environmental data into their work, using examples from reporters in Asia, Europe, and Africa, and to teach participants how to work with data.

Basic practical training on identifying trends, patterns, and outliers, as well as how to spot a good story angle within a dataset, was provided during the session.

This panel session discussed the weekly newspaper West Cape News, civic tech organisation Open Up, and international journalism organisation Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism's content, collaboration, and resource securing.

Attendees learned about Steve's award-winning and impactful exposé of the pervasive presence of sewage in South African drinking water, had the opportunity to interact with Open Up's Water Wazi tool, which combines water and demographic data, and learned about CCIJ's water data repository, which contains thousands of water articles from South Africa and other African countries.