StoryLab Academy Announces Training, Mentorship program Across Africa

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Matt Cooke Google Lab
Matt Cooke
Google Lab, UK

Code for Africa (CfA) is partnering with Google News Lab and the World Bank’s Global Media Development Program to launch an intensive digital skills training and mentorship programme in 12 hub cities across Africa.

The initiative, run as an Academy out of CfA’s award-winning StoryLab journalism laboratory, will use a combination of online webinars and face-to-face learning to help newsrooms adopt new digital ways of finding and telling the news.

With a global network of roving data journalists and digital creatives who help newsrooms on projects ranging from investigative data analysis, to drone journalism and 360° video, StoryLab has physical hubs in four African countries.

The Academy will also offer online courses with Africa-specific projects and assignments, and will work with journalism schools to help give new entrants the skills they need to cement newsrooms’ own efforts to rewire their systems.

The Academy will partner with 36 newsrooms in 12 African cities for bi-weekly onsite workshops teaching the most important digital tools and techniques for strengthening African journalists’ voices online.

In addition to newsroom partnerships, opportunities will include Mass Open Online Courses (MOOCs), public workshops and university partnerships.

The workshops will be hands-on practical sessions, with one-on-one tuition, designed to help participants master a new tool or technique each session, via a range of specialist courses over nine months.

Participation will be free-of-charge, with course modules beginning with Web Fundamentals to give basic digital skills for newsrooms, alongside more advanced specialist tracks for data journalists, investigative reporters, geo-journalists and multimedia storytelling.

The Academy will therefore launch an online course in August for journalists in Africa

Interested newsrooms that want to partner with the Academy should visit the academy website for more information: https://academy.codeforafrica.org/partners