Head of Training and Development at Google News Lab Mr. Daniel Sieberg, recently said in a statement that Google will support the development plan to train 6,000 African journalists within the next nine months.
The training is aimed at enhancing the skills of African journalist with the web and digital tools to boost their story writing.
“While the global news industry faces a knowledge challenge with regards to digital tools, Africa, by virtue of its non-digital education systems, faces even greater odds in the battle for digital integration in news and storytelling,” Mr. Sieberg said.
The training which was inspired by the Code For Africa Digital Journalism Initiative is a joint proposition between the World Bank, Code for Africa and Google. The training will empower African journalists with data journalism skills that will help them advance in their web knowledge and to merge journalism and the web with some digital tools that will be presented to them in nine months.
According to Mr. Daniel Sieberg, the training will take place in 12 major African cities, like Abuja, Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Casablanca, Dakar, Freetown, Dares Salaam, Kampala, and Yaoundé.
“Code for Africa is a data journalism and civic technology initiative operating across Africa that trains and supports journalists and civic activists to better understand and use web tools for news reporting and storytelling.
“Training will take place in three formats and beginning from June 15 and the in-person training sessions will be held in the cities mentioned above.
“In each city, we will conduct training in three newsrooms and training will be held twice a month for the duration of the initiative.
“Beginning from August, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) will be made freely available online, covering a range of web concepts and practices for digital journalists,” he said.
