Who We Are 

Rudimentarily, Minority Africa provides a dynamic and interactive online platform that increases the quality and diversity of reporting about the rights of minority groups by journalists from minority groups across Africa.

Aware of the nexus between representation and stronger civic and democratic institutions, we prioritize and provide journalism by minorities and for minorities focusing our approach on what’s working for minorities through highlighting responses in our reporting.

We do this through a blend of multimedia feature stories published on our website, as well as podcasts and newsletters.

Since we launched in November 2019, we’ve published several multimedia stories and our stories/posts have reached over one million people. We’ve held several virtual events ranging from discourse on disability rights to LGBTQ+ rights and our journalists have been interviewed on our work by the BBC, DW, News Wire NGR, Philadelphia’s WURD Radio, and News Central TV.

We’ve also been featured on the International Journalists Network (IJNET) as a platform using innovative storytelling for inclusion as well as on DW Akademie.

We’ve spoken at Prescott College Arizona and Wayne State University, among others. We’ve been brought on as speakers at Media Viability Talks in East Africa, at the Media Challenge Initiative (MCI) expo and subsequent fellowship for journalists in Uganda, as well as on Poynter discussing alternative models for media companies.

In September 2021, we spoke at JamLab’s Jamfest about media viability from an East African perspective. We won the Aga Khan University Innovators in Residence program for 2020/2021, becoming the only startup chosen in Uganda to be resident and one of three in East Africa.

We’ve partnered with The Future Awards Africa, Maternal Figures, No White Saviors and been incubated by DW Akademie, Media Challenge Initiative, and The Solutions Journalism Network.

Our reporting of marginalized groups is done primarily to ensure representation of these groups in media, but also to change narratives, perceptions and attitudes towards minorities hence creating an Africa in which social and policy systems operate and interface to benefit minoritized communities.

On a similar note, we pay attention to access to information for minority groups and ensure the people who create our content are able to consume it paywall and ad free.

The Minority Africa Fellowship targets journalists and storytellers from minority groups across Africa providing them with the platform, skill, and mentorship to report stories from and about their communities.

Through an intensive six month program, fellows will polish their existing reporting abilities both from a skill and thematic perspective but will also be trained on the intersecting areas and groups of focus for the fellowship. This means that fellows are taught and leave the fellowship knowing how to cover groups outside of the immediate communities they belong to. 

These groups include sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities, persons with disabilities, as well as refugees. We nonetheless acknowledge that all minorities across the continent do not fall under these broad categories and also focus on groups that exist outside of these general definitions. 

Fellows have to be at least 18 years of age, they have to be from and living in an African country and belong to at least one of the minority groups highlighted in the focus areas above. They can be writers, photographers, filmmakers, journalists, or a combination of all and have relevant and provable work experience in their chosen areas. 

During the fellowship, fellows will be familiarized with editorial guidelines of Minority Africa and will work and report on stories for the publication. They are paired with external mentors, work with editors in the newsroom, and are required to produce at least two stories every month. 

As a cohort, fellows get to design and produce a newsletter for Minority Africa as well as individually  take rotational slots as Managing Editor. 

Visit the fellowship website.

Advance is a news agency for African minority stories led by African minorities and with a mission to transform how mainstream media organizations in Africa and globally report on LGBTQ+ rights, religious minorities, women, indigenous peoples, refugees, migrants, and persons with disabilities.

It also refers more broadly to a Minority Africa project arm that is centered on advancing the rights of minorities through forming partnerships with, leveraging the reach of, and training existing media professionals and companies.

Simply put, we are a collaborative news agency by minorities and for minorities and through partnering with newsrooms both at a national, regional, and international level, we’re collectively working to refine their coverage of African minorities.

When we began to conceptualize Advance in 2021, it was primarily because we realized that for the level of impact we were aiming to make as a media company, it was crucial for us to populate news outlets with stories that accurately reflect marginalized groups in Africa leveraging the existing reach of legacy media companies and also training their journalists to be able to do same. 

Currently, media organizations can republish our content for free within the Advance framework. Interested organizations can reach out to the team on: advance@minorityafrica.org.  

The project is running a pilot phase with select media organizations from June 2022.

Visit the Advance website.

Border Dialogues is a series of interactive and live events by Minority Africa bringing you closer to stories, communities, and perspectives on the margins. 

In this well-known interview, Toni Morrison says, “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central.” The ultimate goal of borders and of communities along and in them is not to merely shift from the periphery to the mainstream. Instead, the intention with Border Dialogues is to persistently articulate from the border, from the fringes, speaking loudly enough that the center cannot ignore.

What changes about our discourse and mechanics if we do not solely imagine groups on the outside as valid when they make it to the inside? Not least because venturing into the center has repercussions; border and fringe languages may become obscured in that transition. Coupled with the fact that being physically in the center doesn’t always mean that you are part of it. 

Therefore, the proposal with Border Dialogues is to while on the periphery, envision new centers along the edges. Even though  the ultimate outcome remains uncertain, our suggestion is to initiate discourse from the border, on the margins, dialogue so loud, so impactful, so honest, so human, and so true, that it can become a new center.  

Visit the Border Dialogues website