ADR’s big leap forward
2017 has been an important year for African Defence Review (ADR). This year we were awarded a grant from innovateAFRICA, a fund aimed at improving the reach and capacity of news media on the continent. For us at ADR, it’s meant being able to pursue a number of projects that we’ve believed in for a long time and now finally have the ability to bring to life.
Projects like these.
Project Oya
As an organisation that reports overwhelmingly on war, armed conflict and civil unrest, ADR has built up a large amount of institutional knowledge about the fields we cover.
There’s been much that we’ve wanted to share with colleagues working in more general news organisations — but we’ve lacked the capability. For the first time, we’ve been able to put together a platform which makes the specialist knowledge and data sets that we use every day available to a much wider audience of journalists interested in reporting knowledgeably and responsibly on civil unrest and conflict across the continent.
Enter Project Oya.
Launching towards the end of 2017, Oya will be a freely-available online toolkit that will help those who work or report on conflict in Africa to do so in increasingly powerful ways.
In its initial release, Oya will make available a tool for identifying common weapons and ammunition used in conflict and civil unrest situations, an ability to search archives of high resolution satellite imagery of the continent, and an interface for querying trends in conflict and unrest across the continent.
Oya’s prototype weapon and ammunition identification tool can aid journalists and researchers seeking clarity on the technical details of weaponry, equipment, and a host of military-specific tools.
Don’t know the difference between an assault rifle and a machine gun? Picked up an empty grenade canister or cartridge from police activities and need to know what it was, what might have fired it, and what its capabilities were? Oya’s ID tool condenses an extensive catalogue of technical and descriptive information into a straightforward interface for visually matching artefacts to their weapons.
In addition, our long-running Wire conflict mapping service is undergoing a full integration into Oya, in order to expose its services free to journalists and researchers.
For years, Wire has facilitated access to the University of Sussex’ Armed Conflict and Event Location Database (ACLED), the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) and other conflict datasets through a rich and informative interactive mapping tool.
Timelines, filters for different actors and incidents, and an ability to integrate your selected info into rich data-driven graphics are all goals of the integration. ADR’s Wire has been a valuable tool in providing context to conflict, free and reliable travel risk information, and overviews of the activities of parties to conflict in African hotspots.
Third, through partnering with innovateAFRICA and Skywatch, we can now hope to provide a range of high resolution archival satellite imagery at your fingertips. Newsrooms looking to add a rich new perspective to their reporting can access satellite photographs at up to 40 cm resolution in certain zones.
Most excitingly, Oya is being developed as an extensible platform to which additional services and interfaces can be added in future as the platform evolves. Every newsroom using the platform will be able to gain access to an expanded suite of conflict-related data as Oya itself grows.
Innovative reporting
We’re also going to be producing new forms of online storytelling that push the envelope of what is possible for an online platform.
We have experimented with formats in previous rticles, including pieces such as our coverage of South Africa’s Exercise Young Eagle and the introduction of drones to MONUSCO operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the first time in the United Nations’ history.
We’ll use this mixed-media work to complement the coding we’re doing on Oya too. Embeddable data widgets, archives of imagery available to license from some of the continent’s most under-covered conflicts, and bundles of useful enhancements will all be made available to help others tell the stories of some of the continent’s most under-covered crises.
We have large and potentially transformative ambitions for upgrading conflict and defence reporting in Africa.
Stay tuned
innovateAFRICA’s support of ADR’s work is proving to be a catalyst for our progress into the kind of African-based conflict research hub that we feel the continent needs and deserves. The creation of a Oya, and all the components that plug into it, is a significant step that takes us toward providing truly compelling conflict research in Africa, by Africans.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of data journalism and civic technology laboratories, with labs in four countries and affiliates in a further six countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA’s labs also incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives, including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental , and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting(ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent. CfA is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
