First Person: Finding stories of Kenya’s teenage girls in lockdown
How a collaborative photo- and data-journalism project went looking for numbers and found community-driven solutions
By Wacera Njagi
In December 2020, the article “Here, they’re safe” was published about the plight of teenage girls in Kenya forced out of school due to the pandemic and a youth-run community response that gave these girls a safe space amid the chaos. Wacera Njagi discovered a workshop run by 23-year-old Winnie Achieng that focuses on the safety and wellbeing of teen girls.
A barrage of local and international media publications reported a “spike” in teenage pregnancies in Kenya. The fierce debate about this “crisis” saw the president demand the National Crime Research Centre, a state agency, to investigate the issue. Three months passed and no report was shared to showcase the real data, despite the Ministry of Health claiming the data shared in the news was inaccurate.
After sharing this with my colleagues at Everyday Africa, I started thinking about the lack of solutions-based reporting on this topic. Most reports passed judgment on the girls while others blamed the parents. Were there community health volunteers helping abused teenage girls to access safe houses, or youth activists stepping in to educate teenage girls how to identify and report sexual abuse? When Code for Africa suggested collaborating on a story combining data journalism and photojournalism, I knew I needed to find out how the community responded to these news reports.
Pre-production
The report began as a conversation between Sarah Waiswa, documentary photographer and Everyday Africa contributor, Peter DiCampo, co-founder of Everyday Africa, and me, Wacera Njagi, an editor and visual artist. We resolved to not take faceless or blurred images of teenage girls — a common practice when telling sensitive stories, but one that we feel is often dehumanising — but would instead engage in a perspective that would feature short profiles and portraits of willing participants in this ecosystem: a community health volunteer, teenager (with consent from their parents), youth activist, teacher, and possibly a leader in the community.
Production
After speaking with a few stringers, I connected with a community health worker who was initially excited to introduce me to people in her constituency. After the interview, we read through the transcript to guide the reporting.Confident that the direction we were taking was in line with the plan, Sarah and I went to photograph the community health worker at the time and location agreed.
Unfortunately, I encountered a common hurdle for photojournalists: the community health worker had been happy to give information, but she did not meet us for the photograph, and it became difficult to get in touch with her after that. The interview we had the week before had been so informative, I was crushed to find out she was not interested in us making a portrait of her especially considering I had centered the story around her experience.
Without the community health worker to guide us, I had to change tack. What do you do with a story once you’ve lost your central character, who is also the key to introducing you to others? Now that we were no longer connected, I had to be the fixer. I contacted friends I met while working on a public art project that The Everyday Projects were co-leading, and they graciously connected me with a teacher, a community health worker, and a youth activist.
We began photographing in different locations in Nairobi. Sarah and I walked through Eastleigh, Kilimani, Mlango Kubwa, and Huruma composing a report that was continuous and congruent.
After making photographs of the teacher, the youth activists and two teenagers, and despite having to maneuver insolent security guards, find natural lighting, and work long hours we still felt something was missing. We agreed the story needed a central character whom we could focus on and get to know a bit better.
We met Winnie Achieng at the Mathare Social Justice Center, who was curious about the angle we were taking. She told me about the main reason she founded the workshop, which was to offer a safe space for the girls during the school closures. She said that having grown up in Huruma, she wished there were more engaging programmes she could have accessed, and that maybe her life would have turned out differently.
Afterwards we often spoke on the phone as she updated me on the progress of her programme. This regular contact, during which she spoke passionately about her work, convinced me she could be the new central character of the story. All our conversations were on the record and she approved for me to write about our informal chats on the phone and on WhatsApp.
Sarah asked whether Winnie would agree to be photographed in her home, and fortunately Winnie was open to it. We met her grandmother and Winnie’s beautiful kids. The same morning, Sarah photographed the workshop, and I spoke to the teenage girls in attendance. They were very confident and vocal while sharing their experiences of being out of school due to the pandemic regulations.
Post Production
It was important for us that this story combined the contextual information that data can provide, with personal stories that photojournalism can tell. The news stories that have been shared in the past seven months have been severely undermined by weak data. Sylvia Makinia, of Code for Africa’s PesaCheck project, produced this article ‘Have teenage pregnancies in Kenya increased due to COVID-19 containment measures?’ which set a basis for the data that we would refer to in our report.
Code for Africa’s Tricia Govindasamy made a data visualization that reflected the data the PesaCheck team received from the government database. This only covered the period of January through May 2020. However, we needed the data from May onwards to gauge whether teen pregnancy was in fact on the rise, as the media suggested, but the Kenya Health Information System had not yet released that data.
Many news publications and NGOs repeated the claim that “152,000 Kenyan teenage girls became pregnant — a reported 40% increase in the country’s monthly average.” After tracing where the 40% increase came from, I reached out to the VOA News reporter who was cited but he couldn’t provide the reference to the statistic. Unfortunately, the claim was repeated so much that it came to be accepted as factual.
We reached out to civil society organisations who deal with girl-led initiatives and have been supporting teenage girls while they are out of school. Some NGOs feel the government was hiding true data when this story was picked up by the media. However, the source who claimed this did not share the original spreadsheets that they claimed portray the spike.
On pitching
Pitching is quite a masochistic journalistic function. Like job or grant applications, the more you pitch the more likely you are to get rejected. A pitch tracker helps in organising the chaos of disappointment. At the same time, the more you pitch, the stronger your journalistic character becomes. Tweaking the pitch for each publication you are interested in is as important as editing the story. Truly this bit, in my opinion, is based on a lot of luck and persistence.
After many pitches to local and international media publications, African Arguments picked the story for publication. African Arguments ia a pan-African platform for news, investigation and opinion with the objective to analyse issues facing the continent, investigate the stories that matter, and amplify a diversity of voices. At Everyday Africa, we strive to produce stories that convey a more accurate view of daily life than what is commonly seen in legacy publications. Therefore, publishing with African Arguments brings value to the reportage as it is important to share this story on a platform that appraises predominantly African writers, and that reaches a predominantly African audience.
On Collaboration
Finally, I am very grateful to the Everyday Africa team. My editor Peter DiCampo guided this story and motivated me along the way — especially when the reporting was fraught with unavoidable challenges. He taught me not to compromise on the truth by quoting diverse respondents. Sarah Waiswa taught me many lessons while on the ground that are embedded in my work. To mention a few, natural light and physical context is important in making good photo stories. She also taught me to talk with conviction and heartiness. The teenage girls we interviewed were not only drawn by Sarah’s camera equipment, but also by her charisma and exuberant voice.
I am also very appreciative to the Code for Africa team: Jacopo Ottaviani and Ashlin Simpson for giving us the grant and resources we needed for this report, and Sylvia Makinia and Tricia Govindasamy for their remarkable work and fast turnaround in producing data visualization for the story.
Lessons Learnt
- Editors, aspiring or those who have been working in the industry for years, should report stories. It is very easy to criticize, trim, and advise journalists what to write, but the challenge is in empathising with them by experiencing the process of reporting. The only way to respect the process is by being familiar with it.
- Confidence is key. The most cliche lesson I could ever share, but I learnt it again when on the ground speaking with people who owe me nothing. Raise your voice when necessary so your intentions can be clearly heard, and most of the time, people will willingly assist you.
- Accept when you’re ghosted and accept it fast — professionally and personally. That way, you will find other people to collaborate with who are eager to share their work with you.
- “Things seldom turn out the way you plan.” A quote from Sarah Waiswa. It’s important to plan, but it is also pertinent that one makes room for risk and uncertainty during the pre-production and production phases. This project took longer than expected, however informing the team on the delays was very important in guaranteeing completion of the report.
- Transparency is important when working on a collaborative project. Let people know the developments of your story as you work on it, as meagre as the issue is. That way you will get the support you need, and avoid suffering in silence.
- Be resilient. Freelance journalism is not for the lighthearted. It is a big investment moving up and down different locations, interviewing people, transcribing conversations, analysing data. It’s important to have grit even when setbacks present themselves.
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Wacera Njagi is an editor and visual artist producing diverse projects in their role of Everyday Africa Coordinator at The Everyday Projects. Their works showcase visual storytelling, layout design, and social research. They have collaborated with storytelling teams at ICRC, Huffpost, NPR, World Press Photo Foundation, and others. Wacera is also a comic book artist.
Everyday Africa is a collective of photographers working to broaden perception of Africa beyond the headlines. It’s 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. Everyday Africa is creating new generations of storytellers and audiences that recognize the need for multiple perspectives in portraying the cultures that define us. Our photographers contribute to the @everydayafrica Instagram feed and work together to produce our group exhibitions, publications, and special projects. For a larger database of African photographers working across the continent, there’s the African Photojournalism Database, Everyday Africa’s project with partners World Press Photo Foundation.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 12 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 that African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the best possible forensic 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.
