ICFJ Knight Roundup: Hala Nigeria Projects Launched, Pakistan's First Data Bootcamp

By: 05/13/2015

Hala Nigeria debuts five projects to increase public engagement with health news, Pakistan gets its first data bootcamp and more from the Knight Fellows in this week’s roundup.

Hala Nigeria launches five health engagement projects

Hala Nigeria worked with newsrooms to create health projects that would increase audience engagement on health issues. Using design-thinking techniques, ICFJ Knight Fellows Declan Okpalaeke, Oluseun Onigbinde, Cece Fadope and Babatunde Akpeji worked with a team of technologists, fellow journalists and health experts to complete five projects with media partners in Nigeria.

The Daily Trust, The Nation, The Punch, Vanguard newspapers and TV Continental all helped build apps and websites that focused on maternal health, emergency services, fake malaria medications and Ebola stories. 

Pakistan’s first data bootcamp

ICFJ Knight Fellow Rahma Mian teamed up with ICFJ’s Center for Excellence in Journalism to organize Pakistan’s first data bootcamp. The data bootcamp ended Saturday, but you can check out projects attendees started working on by clicking here.

Throughout the event, journalists, developers and designers tried to “make sense of large government datasets and turn complex information into useful tools for citizens.” ICFJ Knight Fellows Justin Arenstein and Friedrich Lindenberg and Code for Africa’s Serah Rono, helped lead the bootcamp. See some of the slides from their presentations.

Media Factory 2015 seeking applicants

Media Factory pairs Latin American digital media companies with mentors and invests US$75,000 into each organization. The news accelerator program, run by ICFJ Knight Fellow Mariano Blejman, is accepting applications for its second class, which will be held in Buenos Aires over the course of three months beginning Sept. 1, 2015. 

A happy birthday to Poderopedia Venezuela

In Dec. 2012, former ICFJ Knight Fellow Miguel Paz launched Poderopedia in Chile, and his team has since expanded to Colombia and Venezuela. All three chapters have worked to map who is who in business and politics and raise flags when there are clear conflicts of interest.

Poderopedia Venezuela launched on World Press Freedom Day in 2014 and celebrated its one-year anniversary this week. Check out the watchdog organization’s video (in Spanish), which outlines Poderopedia VE’s first year of success. You can also read a blog post written by the team about nepotism within current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government and the military’s political power.

What else the fellows have been up to

  • Fellow Javier Garza spoke at the Global Media Freedom conference. Garza presented Periodistas en Riesgo (Journalists at Risk), a map that tracks attacks on journalists created by Jorge Luis Sierra during his fellowship.
  • Code for Ghana, which was one of the 2012 African News Innovation Challenge winners, held a Twitter chat on the impact of open data on socio-economic development in Ghana.
  • Fellow Juan Manuel Casanueva organized a “Periodismo, Datos y Mezcales” meetup featuring HacksLabs winners Cargografías and Ojo Público.

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

Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via UNICEF Ethiopia.

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