The day Ghana discovered Comoros

Hi there,

I’m staring down the barrel of another heatwave in the UK this week. Hot on the heels of London Climate Action Week, the city’s roasting at 33C. All the more reason to celebrate the news that the UK is on track to meet its climate goals and get to net zero. The full report from the Climate Change Committee is surprisingly optimistic.

But the good news doesn’t end there. This week, I’ve asked my friends at Africa No Filter (ANF) to take the lead. ANF is an advocacy organisation that is shifting stereotypical narratives about Africa through storytelling that reflects a dynamic continent of progress, innovation and opportunity. One of their projects that I find particularly exciting is bird, the news agency they created to help counter those stereotypes within Africa. But I’ll let Moky tell you all about it!

I’ll never forget the day Ghana’s 2021 Africa Cup of Nations campaign came to a humiliating end. Their defeat was one of the biggest shocks in AFCON’s history and for most Ghanaians, the surprise wasn’t just the football result, it was the realisation that Comoros – the small island country off the coast of East Africa that took them out – was in fact, a country in Africa.

Twitter (as it was then) exploded. The comments were revealing as it became clear that Ghanaians didn’t know quite as much about the continent as they thought they did.

That moment has always stayed with me, because it underscored something that I have suspected for a long time – we Africans don’t know each other all that well.

And we are very quick to point to others. We are the first to complain that the world incorrectly and persistently speaks of “Africa” as if it’s a single, monolithic entity. Then we point out that the continent has more than 3,000 ethnic groups and 2,000-plus languages, making it the most ethnically and linguistically diverse place in the world.

But ask us questions about our closest neighbours and we shift uneasily. Sadly, most Africans probably know more about what’s going on in the US. I can bet you that Trump’s name is more widely known on the continent than Boko, Faye or Chapo (those are the surnames of the presidents of Botswana, Senegal and Mozambique).

Africa No Filter’s report How African Media Covers Africa provided the evidence we needed – that Africans consume very few stories about each other. And 81% of the stories they do read are negative, steeped in the stereotypes that have dogged us for years. Bloody coups, elections gone wrong, health outbreaks, humanitarian disasters. In other words, a Nigerian sitting in Lagos reading about Ghana or Egypt is reading the same content as someone sitting in London or Paris.

We decided to do something about it.

bird was the solution. It is Africa No Filter’s story agency – created for one simple reason: to connect the continent through better stories and stories told better. bird provides African media with the kind of stories they don’t have the time, budget or reach to cover.

In just three years, they have published more than 1,500 stories focused on the people, trends, ideas and solutions that are shaping Africa today and too often go unnoticed.

Like the Zimbabwean psychiatrist training grandmothers to provide therapy on wooden benches to address the shortage of mental health professionals. Or the story about Latey: Looking for Love, an Ethiopian dating show that’s become a YouTube sensation. And the data stories, like the one that found Africa dominates global mobile payments with a $190bn contribution to GDP. Who knew?

As a journalist at a major global media outlet once told me, pitching stories about Africa internally that weren’t extreme or chaotic was nearly impossible. Editors weren’t interested in anything that sounded too... normal.

According to our Cost of Media Stereotypes report, this bias towards the negative has a cost: $4.2bn annually in additional interest payments on the loans Africa pays, because of disproportionately higher risk premiums. bird exists to make sure that Africans see all that we are as a continent. And it’s working. The stories have been picked up by more than 150 media partners and generate more than a million views across all platforms every month.

Of all the projects Africa No Filter has birthed, bird may just be the most impactful. It’s helping us rewrite the narrative, one story at a time. It's also helping more Africans know that Comoros is not just a football flash in the pan – it’s also known for producing some of the world’s finest ylang-ylang, which is widely used in perfumes and essential oils!

“I’ve been looking back recently at our early moments at bird, the specialist news agency launched in June of 2021 by Africa No Filter. Screenshots of Zoom calls, contributors from all over Africa looking as enthused and excited as the members of the “Nest”, as we had started calling our remote newsroom. Chat participants seem almost surprised to find themselves in a group discussing what it would mean to “change the narrative on and in, Africa”.

We were surprised – and possibly relieved – that in the middle of a pandemic we were being asked to get busy with something we were collectively passionate about: telling stories that would help right the wrongs of hundreds of years of harmful narratives about Africa. And we’d be paid to do it!

After extensive calls to news editors offering our credentials and story examples, we were up and running. Early stories immediately showed a side of life many both on and off the continent were not aware of, like Mogadishu’s nightlife and 24-hour economy. This was the focus of rookie journalist Jamaac Jamaac’s portrayal of Mohammed Ali Abuhab, set in the bustling “Late Night” restaurant in Mogadishu.

Yomi Afolabi’s story of Ibitoye Olajide, a young would-be engineer in Ibadan, Nigeria, who built a car or in order to get himself accepted into engineering school, was another. A story by the highly energetic and resourceful Seth Onyango showed how Africa was the biggest citrus exporter in the world (joining north with south and shattering the narrative of a starving Africa in a single, “bird’s-eye” frame).

Soon our stories were running on Africa Report, How We Made It In Africa, The East African, Nation Africa, The Mail and Guardian, News24, Citizen Tanzania, Arena publications in South Africa, Trust Media outlets, BellaNaija, Tech Cabal, Quartz Africa and in publications as far away as Indonesia, Italy and Japan, while the accompanying video from our multimedia stories was broadcast on multiple TV channels and on socials. Within months we were reaching an audience of several million a month, with readership per Brand24 reaching 12 million – until an abrupt change in Google’s algorithms brought numbers down to more modest levels.

With limited funds and loads of ambition we kicked off with just five staff, producing two data-based stories and two features every weekday. That would continue for more than a year, until different funders and requirements allowed us to build the “Nest” team to twelve.

As a funded project focusing on narrative change, we have always believed that we needed to build a body of content that has the potential to reach “critical mass” in both audience and impact. Critical mass is the point at which we Africans (as well as the outside world) look past the damaging stereotypes and look instead at Africa as a land of possibility.

Because that – on almost any metric you care to look at – is what Africa is, is what we are.

To get us there, we would need to reach as wide an audience as possible. This was the rationale for a specialist news agency, as opposed to going direct-to-public. With an agency we could reach an audience of millions of readers, viewers and listeners already engaged on other peoples’ platforms, immediately. We were taking a direct route to a massive audience, rather than a slow, organic (and perilous, given search engine algorithms and multiple markets) build over time.

Our “bird’s” eye view would need to take in all of Africa, but also be free to “zoom in” via our contributors, to ultra-local issues and perspectives. For that, we would need the freedom to choose the stories that we believed would have the biggest impact on attitudes and perspectives, as well as on the media industry, and on youth, and on investors.

This has meant chasing core funding, a far harder task than taking on issue-based funding.

While the impact of issue-based funding is still tough to measure, core funding for bird is even tougher; the final impact is narrative change, which manifests over time. Nevertheless, impact from bird stories has come in many unexpected ways.

Our contributors have been selected to participate in courses around the world, our staff have built international names for themselves or been snapped up by other organisations, and the subjects of our stories have become local or even international celebrities. Dorcas Bello’s stories on children with disabilities in Nigeria contributed to a wave of concern for the disabled.

With bird about to enter its fifth year, we have done more than survive; by many metrics we have thrived. Of the first handful of Nesters, our graphics designer Hope Mukami has seen her graphics picked up across Africa and beyond; Ann Mbuthia, fresh out of media school, has engaged with top editors across the continent; and our fact-checker Florence Muendo has personally fact-checked more than 2,000 stories since those early days.

And then, there are those moments when the universe delivers in unexpected ways.

One such moment came early in 2023, just eighteen months after we’d jumped out of the starting blocks.

When the Education Development Center (EDC) – a global education-focused non-profit – needed reporting on some of its more far-flung projects, the center’s principal technical advisor Amy West got in touch with Africa No Filter. A team at bird offered a unique concept … we would engage with, train and mentor local EDC communications staff to help them write stories that would fit bird’s requirements – both for the immediate project and then later, as bird contributors.

Easier said than done. Okwi Okoh, a highly experienced Africa news producer and a former Reuters colleague, along with our content editor Edith Magak, got to work, producing stories that included a clutch from northeastern Zambia, an area hardly ever reported on outside of local newspapers.

Another focus was South Africa, where the EDC was involved with a program for adolescent girls and young women. DREAMS Ambassadors were “young, empowered women who served as community leaders and advocates for HIV prevention and other related support services, particularly for adolescent girls and young women”.

Interviews recorded in Cape Town with former DREAMS Ambassadors from Soweto gave rise to the idea of a podcast that would give young women a safe space to express themselves. And so, in October of 2023, the That’s What She Said Vodcast was born.

It’s a full-blown video podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and other platforms. Its latest season saw young women from all over Kenya sending in video entries to participate in a week’s training before studio sessions hosted by some of Kenya’s most prominent women influencers. Nigeria is next. Through TikTok and other social sites, the podcast has a reach of millions of young women across Africa.

To continue to build an even larger “body of content”, bird now has ambitions of moving from specialist story agency to fully-fledged news agency. The road will be long, with new, self-sustaining business models to supplement and eventually replace, early grant funding. But the universe has already shown that, especially in the current fast-moving media environment, change gives rise to unexpected opportunities. This news agency in Africa has stretched its wings and taken flight, scanning the vast land and ready for the next updraft.”

With editing by Hewete Hailesalassie, editor-in-chief, bird.

Thank you, Moky and Tom! I think it’s so smart to challenge narratives with better, truer stories. One of the problems with stereotypes is that they aren’t just ideas, and they’re certainly not facts, but they are stories – and stories are sticky. Human brains are built to hold onto stories. Journalism can do a lot more to reach beyond the old, stale and wrong stories it clung to in the past, and tell new ones that make the world a better, fairer place.

And that’s exactly what we’re building towards here at TBIJ, where we try to bring you a new perspective on a story or issue each week. But we can’t do it without the generosity of our Insiders, a community of curious people who believe in supporting independent media. If that sounds like you too, then please join us today:

See you next week!