Paradigm Initiative announces 2020 Digital Rights and Inclusion Media fellows
Paradigm Initiative, a pan-African social enterprise that advocates for digital rights and inclusion in Africa has announced the selection of four African journalists for the third edition of its Digital Rights and Inclusion Media Fellows. The media fellowship attracted 430 applications from 30 countries in 2020.
“The Digital Rights and Inclusion Fellowship continues to set the standard in skill development for African journalists. Our Fellows exhibit exceedingly high standards of commitment to digital rights and digital inclusion reporting in their countries – encapsulating the spirit of Paradigm Initiative,” said Emmanuel Vitus, Paradigm Initiative’s Communications Officer and manager of the fellowship.
Speaking on the development, Paradigm Initiative’s Digital Rights Program Officer for Southern Africa and member of the Fellowship Program Selection Committee, Bulanda Nkhowani said, “This year’s application pool is among the largest received and we continue to be inspired by the high-calibre candidates that the program attracts.”
“We are excited about the quality of applications the fellowship attracted in its third year despite the current challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Bulanda said.
Each year since its inaugural fellowship in 2018, Paradigm Initiative selects a group of diverse and accomplished journalists from a competitive applicant pool to partake in the fellowship program, a 5-month intensive embedded learning experience. So far 4 journalists from Ghana, Nigeria and Lesotho have benefited from this robust and transformative experience.
This year’s cohort includes four journalists from 3 countries:
- Shaban Abdur Rahman Alfa, Digital Journalist at Africanews, Republic of Congo
- Khalifa Said, Bilingual freelance journalist based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
- Sinatou Saka, Journalist & Editorial Project Manager at Radio France International, France
- Abisola Olasupo, Multimedia journalist at The Guardian newspaper, Nigeria
This class of 2020 fellows will convene for the first time on June 9,
2020 for an orientation webinar, where they will participate in
orientation and training sessions conducted by the Paradigm Initiative
leadership team. The orientation will be followed by executive training
programs and online collaboration with Paradigm Initiative offices in
Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. Each fellow will be tasked
to write stories about digital rights and digital inclusion, and also
eligible for a legacy in-depth reporting project that will leverage the
skills they learned to inform their audience.
About the 2020 Fellows
Abisola Olasupo is a Multimedia Journalist currently
working with The Guardian Nigeria. As a journalist, she has written
news, politics, features and lifestyle articles which have been
published on The Guardian website and newspaper. Apart from writing
articles, she is a seasoned scriptwriter, producer and presenter for
Guardian TV. Abisola has presented and produced reports, shows and
documentaries on Guardian’s digital TV channels. She has keen interest
in Nigeria, Africa and global affairs. Abisola loves telling human
interest stories and also exploring new cultures when she travels.
Abisola has also attended training and workshops which have shaped her
two years of working as a digital journalist. Abisola holds a B.A. in
English from University of Ibadan.
Abdur Rahman Shaban Alfa, is a digital journalist with
Africanews – a bilingual pan-African channel operating from Pointe Noire
in the Republic of Congo. Born and grew up in Accra, Ghana, Shaban
dreamed of being a radio journalist till he eventually landed in print
journalism after graduating from the Ghana Institute of Journalism. He
worked with a private newspaper, the New Crusading GUIDE, before
transiting to documentary filmmaking for five years. Shaban landed in
online journalism five years ago and has since gone on to consolidate
his expertise in what is a fast-paced and challenging but thrilling
journalism space. With his current role as the Head of English Digital
at Africanews, Shaban enjoys coverage that features an engaging mix of
hard news, sports, business, technology and lifestyle content from an
African perspective. He is tech savvy and a social media enthusiast.
Sinatou Saka is a Beninese journalist and editorial
project manager at Radio France Internationale. She is the coordinator
of the RFI Challenge App Afrique project, a digital innovation
competition whose objective is to promote the emergence of the smart
city in Africa through the development of mobile applications or any
other digital service that improves the quality of urban services or
reduces their costs. Sinatou Saka is the founder of Idémi, a platform
that promotes and helps create digital media in African languages on the
web. Sinatou Saka began her career at ORTB, the Beninese state-run
radio and television, before leading the digital transformation of the
country’s state news agency. Before joining RFI in France, Sinatou
worked as Editor-in-chief of the France-based magazine Afrikarchi.
Khalifa Said is a bilingual freelance journalist based
in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He has built himself a reputation in the
country’s media landscape pursuing stories that many consider risky
given Tanzania’s political situation, all for the sake of holding the
government accountable. Said is a graduate of Tumanini University
College in Dar es Salaam with a B.A degree in Mass Communications. Said
worked for The Citizen, Tanzania’s leading English newspaper, for three
years both as a feature and political reporter where he had the
opportunity to familiarize himself with the country’s inner workings of
its political as well as social and economic systems. Said has written
extensively on Tanzania’s political development as well as providing
countless feature stories as assigned by my senior covering issues of
citizenship, politics, good governance, digital rights, human rights,
and sometimes even global and regional political affairs. Said’s works
have also appeared in major and regional publications like The Elephant
and Africa is a Country, where he has chronicled Tanzania’s developments
especially in its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
About the Digital Rights and Inclusion Fellowship
The Paradigm Initiative Digital Rights and Digital Inclusion Media
Fellowship seeks to embed media professionals within the daily work of
Paradigm Initiative in the fields of digital rights and digital
inclusion in Africa. The fellowship seeks to expose media professionals
to an underreported field of work in national/regional developments and
hopes to increase reporting on digital rights and inclusion in Africa.
The fellowship is designed to immerse outstanding mid-career journalists
in digital rights and digital inclusion advocacy, and intervention
efforts – in Africa.
About Paradigm Initiative
Paradigm Initiative (PIN) is a social enterprise that builds ICT-enabled
support systems and advocates for digital rights in order to improve
the livelihoods of under-served young Africans. The organization’s
digital inclusion programs include a digital readiness school for young
people living in under-served communities (LIFE) and a software
engineering school targeting high potential young Nigerians (Dufuna).
Both programs have a deliberate focus to ensure equal participation for
women and girls. The digital rights advocacy program is focused on the
development of public policy for internet freedom in Africa, with
offices in Abuja, Nigeria (covering the Anglophone West Africa region);
Yaoundé, Cameroon (Central Africa); Nairobi, Kenya (East Africa) and
Lusaka, Zambia (Southern Africa). Paradigm Initiative has worked in
communities across Nigeria since 2007, and across Africa from 2017,
building experience, community trust and an organizational culture that
positions us as a leading social enterprise in ICT for Development and
Digital Rights on the continent. Paradigm Initiative is also the
convener of the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF), a pan-African
bilingual Forum that has held annually since 2013.
