Join our team, and help make a positive difference

It’s not just about fighting misinformation, it’s about giving people the right information. Become part of the CfA team

As the winds of geopolitical change swirl, it gets increasingly difficult to see how we can make a real difference to the lives of the people around us. At times, it feels like African countries are just pawns in a geopolitical power game. The latest round has been triggered by the invasion of Ukraine, and the necessity for Russia to curry favour with African governments to counter the sanctions and opprobrium of much of the western world. In response, the U.S., France, China and Japan, among other countries, are attempting to impose their own narratives and reforge relationships with Africa.

These political strategies operate in tandem with foreign government influence operations, and many local actors embrace them to use for their own misinformation ends. The results can be political turmoil, xenophobic violence, hatespeech, and much more. We need to fight back.

Code for Africa is looking to hire people who want to work on projects that monitor misinformation and disinformation, that investigate the people and motivations that drive them, and — crucially — that produce journalism, analyses and interventions to help make a difference.

We have a range of projects at Code for Africa that involve identifying and exposing the people and narratives that contribute to the erosion of democratic freedoms on our continent. The department that drives the analysis of Africa’s media ecosystems and emerging civic technology sector is called CivicSignal, and we’re looking to add 5 people to our team.

We’re hiring an Insights Editor, someone who can have oversight of all the research and investigative work done by our various departments, and decide what should be published when. Here’s an idea of how that can work: our investigative team of digital forensics experts, the iLab, might be tracking how African academics and supposedly independent journalists in Kenya are commissioned by foreign state-affiliated media to write op-ed content that pushes the narrative of a particular foreign government, and how that content is then syndicated back to African media through content sharing agreements without acknowledgement that the content is state-funded. At the same time, the CivicSignal team could be tracking how content funded by different states is being used by newsrooms across Africa, and PesaCheck, our fact-checking unit, is busy debunking related disinformation on social media.

The Insights Editor would decide that the three departments should collaborate on a report highlighting how these mechanisms contribute to media capture in relevant countries, or decide that we need to produce a piece of journalism that shows what narratives are being pushed, and to what end.

That’s just one example, and it’s close to a traditional editor’s role, but we’re also looking for a Research Manager, someone who can help shape our teams’ focus, who can assess the breadth of what we do in multiple countries, come up with new angles of research, and generally help to shape understanding of African media ecosystems.

We’re also looking for three Media Research Analysts, to focus initially on Kenya, South Africa and Zambia. If you’re an expert on the media ecosystems of any of those countries, and want to help us come up with solutions to media capture, the business of journalism, and other structural issues, this is the job for you.

You’ll find all the procedural information you need if you click on those job ads, but this post is about making you want to click. At Code for Africa, we believe we make a very real and positive difference to people’s lives, and a valuable contribution to the preservation of democratic and other freedoms on our continent. We’d love you to join us.

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. CfA incubates initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative, the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network and the research and analysis programme CivicSignal.

CfA also manages the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the latest 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.