This African organization is helping women data journalists

Before I started a class project on the gender pay gap in African countries last year, the only statistic I knew about the pay gap was about the United States. Specifically, I knew that black American women earn 62% of what their white male counterparts earn for equal work. I had always assumed that this statistic was inclusive of black women everywhere, but it turns out I was wrong.

While conducting my research, I discovered the GenderGap.Africa calculator, an interactive tool that lets users visualize the gender pay gap in African countries. I also read data-driven stories by GenderGap.Africa that delved into the factors promoting the pay gap on the continent, like the “child penalty,” which is the percentage a woman’s income falls behind a man’s because of time taken off for childbirth and child care.

GenderGap.Africa is a project of WanaData Africa, a pan-African network of almost 100 female journalists and data experts. Founded in Nigeria in 2017, the network is currently led by Catherine Gicheru, a Kenyan media powerhouse — she was the founding editor of The Star Kenya, a leading media house in Kenya. The network currently has nine membership chapters in six countries including Kenya, Senegal, and Uganda and has launched data-driven news projects such as GenderGap.Africa, Born Perfect, and Trafficking Africa. Through these projects, the network is trying to amplify underreported stories about women by training them to create interactive data tools, such as live maps and calculators that help news consumers visualize the magnitude of the issues covered. WanaData Africa also curates a list of female data experts and journalists in African countries to make sure African media have no excuses not to hire and commission women experts in this space.

Through partnerships with organisations like Code For Africa, WanaData members receive data journalism training, technology assistance, and micro-grants to support reporting projects. This has given female journalists valuable opportunities to gain skills that are helping them climb the career ladder. In an interview with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), one WanaData Africa member, Vanessa Offiong, spoke about getting promoted because she had learned how to incorporate maps and visual elements in her work — a skill that was completely new to her newsroom. Another member, Wakini Njogu, said that the data scraping and visualization skills she learned had opened doors for her professionally.

Women’s voices are underrepresented in the media worldwide. For instance, a 2019 study found that in the U.S., men are responsible for 71% of stories, while women covered a paltry 29%. A 2013 study of Kenyan media found that there is a 2:1 representation of men to women in governing bodies and top management positions in this space. This is further complicated by the reality that foreign journalists are frequently hired to cover national or continent-wide stories over African journalists, while African men are more frequently commissioned to cover local stories than are African women. It is also quite common to see media panels feature only men (the term “manel” is relevant everywhere), while media panels that do feature women are often restricted to topics like gender and feminism.

Giving women skills in the emerging sector of data journalism, therefore, is an important step toward achieving gender parity in media — as is creating a database, which absolves everyone of the excuse that they could not find female experts in a specific field, and forces them to, rightfully, commission and hire female journalists. Increasing the number of women in male-dominated spaces not only benefits women journalists in their individual professions, but creates space for more — and more nuanced — coverage of women’s stories in the media.