Using the details of data to create the big picture
One of the greatest advantages of data sets is that they are able to uncover details about trends or events that are often taken for granted in the news cycle. A simple chart can pinpoint the exact moment a country’s GDP turned around when the gunfire of civil war stopped. An unchanging line can illustrate how another country has failed to create jobs for its frustrated young people.
A group of journalists in southern Africa want their data to tell the big picture of incremental news developments. Their search, however, has illuminated the challenges in obtaining data in Africa and how that responsibility often lies with the sheer determination of reporters.
In Botswana, as part of the Atlas for Africa training initiative to bring data training to African newsrooms, the Quartz Africa team joined the GabzFM news team, yet another story of domestic violence was at the top of the news agenda. In a town a few hours drive from the capital Gaborone, a young man was forced to dig up the body of the girlfriend he’d killed weeks earlier. The day earlier, another young man murdered his girlfriend in a lovers quarrel.
Despite having a statistics agency and the growing national outcry, Botswana did not keep updated statistics on issues like gender-based violence, said one journalist. Reporters who have tried to work on similar stories were told by police to go to each police station in the country and manually sift through their records. NGOs faced a similar challenge. And ironically, police in turn relied on NGOs and journalists for this kind of data.
“The problem is that we don’t have civic technology information,” said journalist Calistus Bosaletswe.
In South Africa, journalists are able to more open, and the police here release statistics each year. Despite the reams of publicly available Excel sheets, there is no real sense of what the numbers mean. Journalist Rumana Akoob has been trying to pinpoint the number of murders of South Africans with albinism, but finds that police stats simply do not offer this kind of detail. The murders are fueled by superstition and ignorance, and are part of a larger trend around southern Africa.
“This is what they say, ‘We know there are people being killed,” says a frustrated Akoob, a reporter for The Daily Vox. “But no one’s taking responsibility for documenting those deaths.”
The Guardian US’s The Counted project may offer an example of the power of civic journalism, and the African journalists were inspired by it. The Counted monitors police killings by relying on incremental local reports and tips. Their simple, interactive database has also helped uncover previously unknown stats, like the fact that African America men are nine times more likely to be killed by police then any other demographic group.
The African journalists Quartz Africa trained hope to use the free, simple Atlas platform to create similar projects to hold their authorities to account and provide an accurate big picture of murders that are often forgotten.
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’s innovateAFRICA fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
