First person: Achieving work-life balance as a journalist in a pandemic
How storytellers in Africa thrived and stayed productive despite the Covid-19 outbreak
Working through the pandemic as a journalist or photographer is particularly difficult considering the profession traditionally requires certain levels of socialising. How then can professionals in the media find work-life balance while navigating the challenges brought forward by the Covid-19 outbreak?
Wacera Njagi, a journalist with Code for Africa (CfA) partner Everyday Africa, a collective of photographers working to broaden the perception of the continent, found their answer. While tackling work head-on and adding notable achievements to their portfolio, they also made strides learning new tricks in the trade, personal projects and much more.
In the last 18 months since the world locked down, Wacera curated photo exhibitions in New York, Cairo, Germany and Amsterdam. Along with other African photographers working for Everyday Africa, they got the opportunity to contribute to the African Photojournalism Database — a community of over 600 African visual journalists. With support from CfA, Wacera also did a story using data-driven journalism and photography about the effects of school closures on Kenyan teens during the start of the pandemic.
Other projects taking up Wacera’s time consisted of product design — producing creative assets for The Everyday Projects grant and The Essentials free photography classes. They were also a part of an initiative painting street art installations around Nairobi. To cap it all, they produced audio for museum audio tours, and spoke in panel discussions and virtual chats with African visual artists and anthropologists.
Read about Wacera’s and their team’s mission to amplify the voices of African photographers and the lessons they learned attempting to stay productive while working from home.
By Wacera Njagi
Create a schedule
Like most people, working from home has saved me a lot of time and resources. The question was, how can I use these new-found, very precious resources to my advantage? I started by making a schedule. With a routine in place, I was able to include time in my days to do things I like and to stay on top of work output, lifestyle and identity.
More importantly, keeping a schedule and maintaining feasible internal deadlines helped my colleagues and I start and finish our projects successfully.
Spend time learning new skills
Brevity is a virtue when designing for a community on social media. Therefore, your creative assets should communicate your message clearly, and when using a call-to-action like ‘Register Here’ or ‘Apply Now’, it’s important to get straight to the point.
You can diversify your design portfolio by experimenting with bursts of color. Mastering colour theory is a big plus and the best part is you can learn all about it for free from YouTube.
Immerse in archives
Quote by Yasmina Price, motion picture critic at Art Forum.
It is important for visual artists to learn about the tumultuous and violent history of the camera in African countries. By educating yourself with archival research, you intentionally unlearn some of the cultural habits one may have picked up unconsciously from the captive colonial gaze.
Working at Everyday Africa, I am inspired by our own visual archive of contemporary Africa. I also love the works of young visual storytellers like Silvia Rosi and David Uzochukwu. During the pandemic, I looked through several deep archives of African photographic legends like Seydou Keïta and James Barnor.
These artists inspired my favorite photographers by reclaiming the lens in their home countries, and framed people from different African countries and in the diaspora with dignity and reverence. This is critical towards our daily contributions as artists, editors, and curators as we try to redeem a gentle and truthful gaze in the mushrooming African visual repositories. For example, Clémentine de la Féronnière runs one of my favorite digital archives of James Barnor.
Get to the point
We’re in a pandemic and most of us are not well. With access to the internet, it’s so easy to feel like you’re drowning in waves of information.
Hopping from one virtual meeting to the next has become the norm but the pulp of community building and collectivism is a well-thought out conversation. It is fine to check in on your colleagues and community members, but keep the chats succinct, functional, and intentional. Remember to be considerate of other people’s time, and try to communicate clearly by getting straight to the point.
Working from home
Working from home comes with its own demands on work-life balance and I soon learned that I needed a designated space for work. This way, I can get in and out of that bubble, physically and mentally.
Plus, finding hobbies outside of the house was important to this transition as it improved my day-to-day life. I run 10km twice a week and tend to a vegetable garden, two activities that have greatly improved my mental health.
Rest as a foundation for foresight
Working smart also means being deliberate about prioritising time for rest. Working while exhausted is self-abandonment, and it will show. This is a simple call-to-action; schedule your leave days and claim your paid time off. When you take care of yourself, you can take care of your projects and your colleagues.
All said and done, community building in the context of an arts collective is tough work, especially when hosted online. The whole idea of Arts and Culture is being with people and exchanging knowledge and assumptions together.
The pandemic has forced us to adapt to a new world of work and collaboration, and everyday we are learning and applying new and recurring lessons to this evolving culture. It is all worth it because community means looking out for each other, and learning how to take care of ourselves so we can show meaningful practical support.
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Everyday Africa is a collective of photographers working to broaden perception of Africa beyond the headlines. Everyday Africa is the first of The Everyday Projects, an ever-growing global community of photographers who strive to make images that convey a more accurate view of daily life than what is commonly seen in the media. The photography collective is nurturing new generations of storytellers and audiences that recognize the need for multiple perspectives in portraying the cultures that define us. The photography of Everyday Africa is featured regularly in the world’s leading publications and at exhibitions in international galleries and festivals. We work with dozens of schools to reach thousands of students through our visual literacy curriculum, partner with the World Press Photo Foundation to support the African Photojournalism Database, and produce original stories about daily life in Africa on @everydayafrica.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 21 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions, and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative and the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network.
CfA also manages the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the best possible forensic data tools, digital security and whistleblower encryption to help improve their ability to tackle crooked politicians, organised crime and predatory big business. CfA also runs one of Africa’s largest skills development initiatives for digital journalists, and seed funds cross-border collaboration.
