We are an impact accelerator with a pan-African approach on a mission to accelerate change through data-driven initiatives.

Africa's largest network of civic tech and open data labs

Initiatives

The iLAB is an investigative and forensic analysis team that works in support of the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), a CfA initiative that brings together the continent's leading investigative newsrooms to tackle complex investigations. The iLAB's role includes spearheading investigations that individual ANCIR newsrooms cannot handle alone, such as forensic analysis of suspected digital disinformation campaigns or toxic content aimed at misleading citizens or causing social discord.

The iLAB team is transnational and works across multiple countries in Africa, including Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa, and is open to exceptional applicants from elsewhere in Africa. 

In addition to local languages, we work in Arabic, English and French.

The iLAB's investigations and dossiers are published on the 

InnovateAFRICA

ANCIR's iLAB

Pulitzer Center

ICFJ

Digital Forensics Research Lab - DFRLabs

iLAB investigates disinformation, equipped with world-class knowledge on forensic investigation, data analysis and visualisations.

Allan Cheboi

Senior investigations manager

Assogba Arsène

Fact-checker

Eliud Akwei

Investigative analyst

Peter Kimani

Investigative data analyst

John Njambi

Christian Ngnie

Investigative data scientist 

Khattab Hamad

Tagwa Warrag

Solonka Dorcas

Ivan Gosyia Musebe

Moffin Njoroge

Nirali Patel 

Data analyst

Spearheading data-driven forensic investigations 


Code for Africa's Academy stands at the forefront of Africa's digital revolution, empowering individuals with the knowledge, skills, and networks needed to drive social change. 

The Academy's curriculum is carefully crafted to address the pressing challenges faced by African communities, including issues related to governance, transparency, and accountability. 

By hosting online courses ranging from data journalism to digital security on our Massive Open Online Course platform, the Academy ensures that professionals are well-prepared to tackle real-world problems and effect positive change in their respective fields.
                                                    

Google News Initiative

DW Akademie

academy.AFRICA

World Bank

academy.AFRICA empowers Africans to leverage technology for social change and data-driven storytelling through diverse courses and workshops.

Arame Thiam

Joseph Dokhare

Tolulope Adeyemo

Senior programme manager

Emma Kisa

Christelle Pandja

Francophone community coordinator

Empowering Africa through technology and data-driven storytelling

The Press Award 

The Best Award 

This award-winning initiative works to give citizens a new perspective on their lives. Using drone technology, africanDRONE empowers local pilots through a self-help network that offers seed funding, skills development, resource sharing, advocacy, and networking opportunities for members. The goal is to support the evolution of a vibrant and diverse drone ecosystem across Africa.

World Resources Institute

africanDRONE

Code for All

Liquid Telecom

africanDRONE brings together communities of drone operators, enthusiasts, journalists, activists, and entrepreneurs in Africa who use drones for good.

Laura Mugeha

Community coordinator

Empowering citizens through drone technology

,  uses NLP and other machine learning tools  to detect how narratives across African media and the news are evolving or being subverted by malign actors. 

To date, we have mapped hundreds of media sources across 22 countries and have ongoing research partnerships with global thought-leaders such as Global Disinfo Index (GDI), the DoubleThink Lab, Digital Public Square, Google Jigsaw, the Reuters Institute @ Oxford University, the Global Media Registry, Journalist Trust Project, & the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

CivicSignal

CivicSignal uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to map media and civic tech ecosystems to provide actionable insights from analysis by human experts.

Amanda Strydom

Praise Abraham

Research analyst

Mungai Ngige

 Deputy insights manager

Understanding Africa's digital democracies

sourceAFRICA is powered by DocumentCloud, and allows you to turn your documents into machine readable data, for better analysis. It also makes it easier for you to share documents and/or collaborate with your audience and colleagues.

sourceAFRICA is offered as a service by ANCIR (the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting) with support from Code for Africa.

sourceAFRICA

PesaCheck

What do we mean by actionable documents? Documents that the public need to help make more informed decisions, or that help civic watchdogs such as the media or social justice NGOs substantiate their reportage, or documents that have been suppressed or censored elsewhere.

Africa’s premier repository for “actionable documents”

The Best Data

OpenAFRICA is Africa's largest independent repository of open data, aiming to be the continent's largest public data platform. It serves as a crucial resource for data professionals, academia, and communities, providing access to a wide range of datasets that are valuable for research, innovation, and public interest projects. The platform is used by various civil society organizations and initiatives to upload and manage their data, including institutions actively using open data to drive change. 

open.AFRICA

openAFRICA aims to be the largest independent repository of open data on the African continent.

Jacopo Ottaviani

Chief data officer

Clemence Kyara

Chief technology officer

Xavier Odhiambo

Site reliability engineer

Africa's largest volunteer-driven open data platform

PesaCheck was founded in 2016 and was initially focused on verifying financial and other statistical numbers quoted by public figures in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. 

Now, PesaCheck is Africa's largest misinformation fact-checking initiative, with full-time researchers in 15 African countries who produce over 2,000 debunks annually. These debunks result in over 5 million posts being labeled as harmful or misleading on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. PesaCheck is Meta's fourth largest partner globally and is accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), among others.

PesaCheck fact-checks in two international languages (English and French), as well as in major African languages such as Amharic and Kiswahili. Our ecosystem of tools helps track political promises by politicians (through our 

 toolkit), helps unpack budget and census data (through our 

 platforms), and builds machine learning/artificial intelligence tools (such as DebunkBot, discontinued after X's API changes) to help automate verification. 

PesaCheck also supports independent CheckDesks in 28 newsrooms and NGOs across the continent.

PesaCheck debunks misleading claims and deciphers the often confusing numbers quoted by public figures in 15 African countries.

Amelia Nakitimbo

News editor

Doreen Wainainah

Managing editor

Africa's largest fact-checking initiative

is an interactive website and data visualisation tool designed to make it easier for journalists, researchers, and activists in Kenya to access, explore, interpret, and report on complex budget and census data. The tool aims to empower citizens to engage with their leaders on policy and governance issues at the county level, fostering an informed and participatory citizenry.

PesaYetu is built on CfA’s HURUmap technology and offers features such as an interactive map showing county-specific data, searchable documents, datasets, data-driven stories published by partners, and rich data functions for interacting with various charts and visualised data. Users can pin and compare data between two counties, download charts in various formats, and share information easily. The data visualisations on PesaYetu are the result of extensive work to liberate data from lengthy PDF reports, making it more accessible and usable for evidence-driven analysis and reporting.

PesaYetu was built in 2019, using CfA's proven 

 technology, under the ‘Our County: Our Responsibility’ project, funded by Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), with support from 

PesaYetu

KCOMNET

PesaYetu helps  journalists, researchers and activists transform their work with granular county-specific information for Kenya

Stephane Njoki

Christine Kandeo

Kiprotich Koros

Copy editor

Keziah Kinuthia

Deputy product manager

sensors.AFRICA is a pan-African citizen science initiative that uses sensors to monitor air, water, and sound pollution, providing citizens with actionable information about their cities. The initiative aims to give citizens hyperlocal real-time data on environmental conditions such as air quality, water pollution, noise, radiation, temperature, and humidity trends, in formats that are accessible and useful for making informed decisions.

The project involves a network of low-cost, open-source sensors that are used at the household level to monitor environmental conditions. The data collected by these sensors is made publicly available for researchers, governments, journalists, city managers, neighbourhood groups, environmentalists, and interested citizens through the open.AFRICA repository and real-time visuals on the sensors.AFRICA website. Monthly visualised reports are also shared with all custodians. sensors.AFRICA also engages in partnerships and collaborations with various organisations and institutions to expand its network and impact.

sensors.AFRICA is currently based primarily in East Africa but has plans to scale and establish strong bases in both West and South Africa.

sensors.AFRICA

sensors.AFRICA provides actionable information to citizens and civic watchdogs on environmental pollution, hazards and climate risks in their cities.

Gideon Maina

Senior IoT engineer

Usman Ahmed

Hardware engineer

Alicia Olago

Senior product manager

Pan-African citizen science sensors technology for smart cities and climate action 

WanaData is a pan-African network of female data scientists, journalists and technologists working to change the digital landscape by producing and promoting data-driven projects while applying digital technologies in storytelling. 

 WanaData aims to address gender data gaps in Africa by empowering women in media with data literacy, technology, editorial support, and financial grants to support their data investigative work. 

The network gives members access to mentorship, training, microgrants and networking opportunities to its members. 



WanaData members have collaborated on cross-border reporting projects that incorporate data visualisation, artificial intelligence, audience engagement strategies, social videos, drone journalism and other innovative approaches to enhance news content on the continent.

WanaData

WACC

InfoNile

Oxpeckers

WanaData is a pan-African network of female data scientists, journalists and technologists changing the digital media landscape in Africa.

Our Team

About > Members

Members

We have teams in all corners of Africa, with our main offices in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal. With staff distributed across 22 countries, we are perfectly positioned to tackle issues facing African citizens.

Our pan-African team is spread across the continent

Stories

Online learning can narrow the gender gap in STEM but progress is slow

New tool to aid storytellers in Kenya with budget and census data

Remote battery management tranforms monitoring

Unlocking a fairer data future: Code for Africa joins Data Values Campaign

News and stories

Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented, virtual and mixed reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.

A more informed world has always been core to Google's mission.

We believe that everyone, everywhere should be able to access a diversity of credible sources to get the information they need. That starts with a news industry that gives every community a voice.

We're dedicated to working with the news industry so that global newsrooms and local papers alike can flourish.

In 2018, we launched the Google News Initiative to scale our work with journalists, publishers and industry leaders in order to help build a resilient future for news around the globe.

The Agence Française de Développement (AFD) Group funds, supports and accelerates the transition to a fairer and more sustainable world. Focusing on climate, biodiversity, peace, education, urban development, health and governance, our teams carry out more than 4,200 projects in France’s overseas departments and territories and another 150 countries. In this way, we contribute to the commitment of France and French people to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).


Deutsche Welle (DW) is Germany's international broadcaster and one of the most successful international media outlets. We provide impartial news and information, giving people worldwide the opportunity to form their own opinions, assess issues of local and global significance and participate in social debates as active and informed citizens.

We produce distinctive, regionally relevant and dialogue-based content in 32 languages centering around six focus topics: freedom and human rights, democracy and good governance, free trade and social justice, technology and innovation, health education, nutrition and environmental protection, and German and European culture.

We work to shape a future worth living around the world. This is GIZ’s vision and long-term goal.

GIZ provides tailor-made, cost-efficient and effective services for sustainable development. 

The World Bank Group works in every major area of development. We provide a wide array of financial products and technical assistance, and we help countries share and apply innovative knowledge and solutions to the challenges they face.

With 189 member countries, staff from more than 170 countries, and offices in over 130 locations, the World Bank Group is a unique global partnership: five institutions working for sustainable solutions that reduce poverty and build shared prosperity in developing countries.

The Pulitzer Center has a bold vision: to be the venue for the world’s most innovative and consequential reporting, with journalism as the key element for mobilizing society through audience engagement strategies.

Founded in 2006, the Center is an essential source of support for enterprise reporting in the United States and across the globe. The thousands of journalists and educators who are part of our networks span more than 80 countries. Our work reaches tens of millions of people each year through our news-media partners and an audience-centered strategy of global and regional engagement.

We believe that people and communities who actively engage with systemic challenges will find solutions together. By supporting journalists as they conduct in-depth investigations, produce compelling stories, and engage diverse audiences, we create a ripple effect of world-changing impact. The result? Policy reforms, public awareness, and community empowerment.

Our mission since 1945 is to build peace through international cooperation as it is the only way to build bridges between nations. Therefore, as a laboratory of ideas, UNESCO seeks to offer a broad range of expertise in the fields of Education, the Sciences and Culture.

UNESCO

We enable a global network of journalists to provide the trustworthy news essential to free and strong societies.

Their vital work strengthens democratic ideals and spurs change. At ICFJ, we serve more than 160,000 journalists around the world, helping them cover the most critical issues of today, innovate to deeply connect with communities, and build news organizations that thrive.

At ICFJ, we know “it takes a journalist.” That’s why we support journalists everywhere as they face immense challenges: online and physical attacks, disinformation, an erosion of trust, an ever-changing media landscape, and threats to their freedom and their lives.

We equip news media to address these challenges, building skills and fostering connections among our vibrant, global network. ICFJ programs include a mix of training, mentorship, fellowships and financial support. We focus our efforts on three strategic areas vital to the future health of journalism and those it informs:

Code for All started in 2013 with the idea to bring organizations together who were doing similar work within civic tech in different parts of the world. Code for All is now a global network composed of 31 civic tech organizations from around the world.

Civic tech, in short, is technology that positively impacts society — but that’s not the whole story. It’s about creating civic innovation tools (tools that help make more democratic, transparent and people centered governments), but it isn’t only about the tools themselves — it’s about the process through which these tools are created.

Our mission is to connect civic tech organizations so they can learn from each other, leading to greater impact in their local communities. With the support of this international network, each of our member organizations have access to tool-kits, projects, and expertise from people doing similar work in different corners of the world. Our job is to bring them together, help them share resources and grow stronger in the work they do.

We believe in driving social change through digital technology, citizen participation and collaborative decision-making, while improving the relationship between governments and citizens.

skills developmentCivic technologiesdata-driven initiatives