In Uganda, Atlas for Africa participants aim to track refugees, government budgets, and civic data

In Kampala, we had the opportunity to work with more than 20 journalists from a range of publications across the country. Our first training session was with digital and business journalists at NTV Uganda, one of the country’s largest TV stations. Then we did a session with the staff at the African Centre for Media (ACME), who often conduct trainings for local journalists. Lastly, we held an open session with journalists from publications including the East African, New Vision, and Agence France Press, at ACME’s headquarters.

I was impressed by the diversity of data stories the reporters came to the training with. We had asked participants of the open session to give us examples of stories or data sets that they’d like to visualize with data, and the answers were impressive. The reporters wanted to look at how government budgets are being spent, from micro-irrigation schemes to education. Several wanted to use Atlas to show the increase in refugees arriving in the country — Uganda currently hosts 1.2 million refugees, mostly from South Sudan.

Many of the reporters were locally focused. One wanted to show how environmental degradation caused by mineral deposits in northern Uganda have increased. Another wanted to look at the causes of death at a local hospital.

I was also impressed by the enthusiasm of participants. One group took an overnight bus to attend the open session.

One challenge was that the experience of the journalists with data visualization varied quite a bit. Some had been working with Atlas for some time now and others had never worked with any chart building tools. Several journalists asked where the data came from. Others were concerned with how to verify or confirm such data. We’ll bring these concerns and questions to Quartz’s data editor, Christopher Groskopf, to help inform a video session on the basics of working with data, which we are planning for Atlas for Africa participants.

This blog post is part of a series written for Atlas for Africa, an initiative to bring Quartz’s chart-building platform, Atlas, to newsrooms and organizations across Africa for free, in support of greater access to Africa-focused data sources and visualization. Interested in a training session with the Atlas for Africa team? Email atlasforafrica@qz.com. Atlas for Africa is supported by Code for Africa’sinnovateAFRICA fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.