Journalism for All: The Conversation Africa

Running a newsroom with a regional or national scope is no easy task. Now try doing that for an entire continent.

That’s the challenge faced by Jabulani Sikhakhane, editor of The Conversation Africa. A South African journalist specializing in business and economics, his corner of The Conversation family brings him a scope of over 40 countries, and more than 1.216 billion people speaking some 2,000 languages. 

At the second event of the Global Journalism Innovation Lab’s (external link)  Spring Speaker Series, Sikhakhane discussed the need for explanatory journalism in Africa, and the challenges and opportunities that come with it. Audience members and host Dr. Michelle Riedlinger of the Queensland University of Technology engaged in a lively Q&A session following his 20-minute talk, displaying clear interest in Sikhakhane’s experience.

Based in South Africa, Sikhakhane said The Conversation Africa has grown from a small team in Johannesburg to a cohort of 26 journalists scattered across the continent, including in Nairobi, Lagos, Ghana, and Senegal. As their team expands, so does their ability to solicit and produce content. “When we started, we were 100 per cent us calling, harassing academics, asking them to write for us,” said Sikhakhane. Seven years later, he says, that’s changed, as pitches are now coming in unsolicited – though not in volumes comparable to other Conversation outlets. 

Riedlinger said The Conversation Australia accepts only one in eight pitches, but Sikhakhane said The Conversation Africa accepts around 80 per cent. The Conversation’s model is based on academics sharing their expertise for the sake of improving public discourse. However, Sikhakhane said academics in Africa are often so overloaded with work they have little time to write without compensation. As a result, there are fewer submissions.

The state of education in Africa provides another challenge. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, almost 60% of youth in Sub-Saharan Africa are not in school. Sikhakhane recalls sitting with a group of unemployed peers in the village where he grew up, as they talked about increases in petrol prices. While they didn’t quite understand how the prices were calculated, they were still having an animated discussion about why they were going up. The lesson hit him years later: everyone is interested in economic subjects, because everyone participates in economic activity. Yet the way those topics are debated and explained can be exclusionary, due to platforms and terminology used. “If we want to reach as wide a population as possible, one has to find ways of overcoming these barriers,” he said.

        This is a particular challenge in a continent with over 2,000 living languages, many of which do not have words for academic concepts, which are often first developed in English or French. For example, in South Africa, Sikhakhane said, the central banks have made efforts to engage the public, but the public does not always speak their language – literally. Even when technical terms are translated into Indigenous languages, those new words take time to be taken up by the general population. For this to happen, Sikhakhane said, universities and schools need to translate, adopt, and disseminate the new nomenclature. 

As does the media–according to Sikhakhane, the most prolific inventor of new words in the isiZulu language is isiZulu-language radio station Ukhozi FM, which has come up with new technical terms as needed over the years. Sikhakhane said this kind of media-assisted mass-movement of new terms is necessary to embed them in the language.

In his own work writing a business and economics column in isiZulu, Sikhakhane gravitated towards explanatory journalism through his efforts to translate foreign concepts into the language. This produced its own challenges: resorting to metaphor, he said, can limit the audience, as can wide disparities between how the language is used in urban and rural areas. It isn’t a problem limited to isiZulu: Sikhakhane says The Conversation Africa is now seeking to expand into the West African Pidgin English and Swahili languages, and he wonders if Swahili has kept up with yearly advances in terminology.

Those listening to the talk were curious about how The Conversation Africa manages such a wide scope, with so many different audiences. In response to one question about their pitching process, Sikhakhane said his team tries to strike a balance of regional coverage over a weekly or monthly basis, which helps them manage the diversity of their audience. “We try and pay attention to what’s moving, in other words, ‘what is it that people in Nigeria are talking about?’ And trying to accommodate it in the content and the packaging of the material that we put out.”

A subsequent question asked if he sees common issues across countries. Sikhakhane said that while some things, like food inflation, energy, and climate change are prevalent topics across the continent, each country has its own particular circumstances. He gave the example of Nigeria, where security issues prevented farmers in the rural north from transporting food to urban centres in the south, exacerbating existing food inflation problems. Meanwhile Kenya, he said, has been dealing with two years of locust swarms and a drought, which had their own local impacts on food prices.

The Conversation Africa is expanding to other media to better engage these audiences. While the publication is primarily text based, Sikhakhane said, “radio remains the most important platform, I think, on the African continent.” That’s why The Conversation Africa has been producing podcasts over the past two years, and more recently, embedding audio readings in each article. 

The more audio content they can produce, he says, the easier it will be to work with radio stations. Another avenue for expansion is courting re-publishers, which Sikhakhane says is already helping boost readership. So far, collaboration with Kenya’s Nation Media Group, which owns several print, radio, and TV outlets across East Africa, has helped The Conversation Africa extend its reach into the region. He said their content is also being re-published in Ghana “quite regularly” and they are now working hard to do the same in Nigeria.

"It's a slow grind,” he said, “but slowly we’re gaining traction.”