ICFJ Knight Roundup: Dodgy Doctors App Helps Nigerians Check Doctors' Credibility

By: Jefferson Mok | 01/08/2016

Each week as part of the Knight International Media Innovators blog, the ICFJ Knight team will round up stories focused on how their fellows are making an impact in the field. Find out more about the fellows' projects by clicking here.

An app to find doctors in Nigeria, Innovation Fellowships in Kenya, and more from the Knight Fellows in this week’s roundup.

Dodgy Doctors app launches in Nigeria

Is your doctor a quack? For Nigerians, this question has been difficult to answer. Code for Nigeria, a local chapter of ICFJ Knight Fellow Justin Arenstein's Code for Africa network, is partnering with Sahara Reporters to launch a tool to change this.

The Dodgy Doctors service uses official Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) data to help citizens check whether their doctor is registered and in "good standing." The inspiration for this comes from the success of a similar tool launched by Arenstein’s Code for Kenya with The Star. Arenstein wrote this blog post on the launch in Nigeria.

Code for Kenya's Innovation Fellowships give newsrooms a tech boost

ICFJ Knight Fellow Catherine Gicheru, Code for Kenya and the Kenyan Media Programme launched a cohort of Innovation Fellows in Kenya to build a series of data journalism projects focused on issues like the treatment of HIV positive prisoners, the exploitation of subsistence farmers, and the hidden hand of organized crime in Kenyan society. Read more about the Innovation Fellows and their work here.

A news game offers a ride on a new public transportation line in Pakistan

Funding has been announced and the plans drawn up for Karachi's Green Line, an ambitious public transportation project to establish a rapid transit line with modern buses. ICFJ Knight Fellow Shaheryar Popalzai and ICFJ Innovation Fellow Shakeeb Ahmed helped the Express Tribune develop a news game for readers to roll through the proposed bus line and learn about the project’s feasibility. Ride along at this link.

2016 is the year to lead on speed, says Mariano Blejman

As part of NiemanLab's end-of-the-year predictions, ICFJ Knight Fellow Mariano Blejman highlights speed management as the key issue that will drive digital journalism’s evolution. "We have listened carefully to Vox Media's Trei Brundrett say that if an article takes more than one second to download, you start to lose readers," Blejman writes. Now the challenge is to produce rich digital content that includes interactives and data graphics at a speed that meets user expectations about download speeds. Who will win that race? Google? Apple? We can’t wait to find out.

Code for Nigeria dives into civic tech space in Nigeria

Code for Nigeria's lead technologist Temi Adeoye ended 2015 with a bang. Adeoye led a panel on how to make government data interesting at a Lagos workshop co-hosted by The Pulitzer Center and the School of Mass Communications at the University of Lagos. Africa Check wrote this blog about the event. Adeoye and Code for Nigeria also helped lead the Open Data Party in December. Adeoye presented on the "Ideation in Civic Innovation," showcasing Code for Nigeria’s civic tech and data journalism focus for 2016.

Africa Check featured on BBC's 'More or Less'

Peter Cunliffe-Jones, executive director of Africa Check, was featured on BBC’s "More or Less: Behind the Stats" podcast to highlight some important numbers coming out of the Nigerian presidential race in 2015. Africa Check was a winner of Arenstein's 2012 African News Innovation Challenge. Head to the 12:28 mark of the podcast to find out why Cunliffe-Jones's 2015 number of the year is 7 trillion.

This post is also published on IJNet, which is produced by ICFJ.

Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via RA Torsten Kellotat.

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