Do you want to help drive high-impact projects in the civic technology and digital democracy space?
Code for Africa (CfA) is hiring a highly organised, detail-oriented project and production-focused Insights Manager to lead investigative analysis and manage editorial workflows for its transnational iLAB team. This hybrid role merges editorial direction and project coordination, and team leadership. You’ll be both a traffic controller, ensuring content production flows smoothly and on time, and a compass, steering the team toward compelling, impactful storytelling grounded in investigative findings.
The iLAB works in support of the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which is a CfA initiative that brings together the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms to investigate crooked politicians, organised crime and big business. The iLAB spearheads investigations that individual ANCIR newsrooms are unable to tackle on their own. This includes forensic analysis of suspected digital influence operations and disinformation campaigns, as well as toxic content aimed at misleading citizens or triggering social discord or polarisation using hate speech or radicalisation or other techniques. The iLAB also supports partners to investigate transnational organised crime, illicit financial flows and state capture on the continent.
The successful candidate will work with a multilingual, multinational team investigating information manipulation, coordinated inauthentic behaviours, and compiling dossiers that have an impact on the continent. Your core mission: ensure smooth production pipelines, streamline workflows, and coordinate the delivery of impactful editorial investigations that support civic accountability and democratic resilience.
Required minimum requirements include:
- 5+ years of experience as a project manager or a related position, preferably within the media, tech, nonprofit, or development sectors.
- Demonstrable experience managing editorial teams and projects in newsrooms, think tanks, research hubs, or investigative journalism settings.
- Demonstrated expertise in production workflows, project management systems, or newsroom operations.
- Strong organisational skills and a knack for multitasking under pressure.
- Experience with collaborative tools like Trello, Slack, Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides), Notion, or Airtable.
- Familiarity with editorial timelines, content calendars, and structured delivery cycles.
- Excellent editorial judgment and the ability to distil insights from complex, dense research into clear, engaging content.
- Strong writing and editing skills with an emphasis on clarity, brevity, and storytelling in English.
- A collaborative, culturally sensitive approach to cross-border teamwork.
- High professional ethics and a rigorous attention to detail.
Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:
- Knowledge of information disorder (misinformation, disinformation, mal-information) and/or online conspiracist or hate speech content.
- Experience in open source intelligence (OSINT) research and fact-checking.
- Familiarity with online publishing platforms and social media tools.
- Experience building partnerships with newsrooms, civil society, or digital advocacy groups.
- Proficiency in French, Arabic, Swahili, or other widely spoken African languages (in addition to English).
Language and Location Requirements:
- Location: Africa
- Preferred location: Anywhere in Africa
- Languages: English and/or French
About this role
The successful candidates will be part of a ‘technology for good’ team of forensic researchers and data scientists/analysts at the iLAB, who work in support of African watchdog newsrooms and other human rights-defending organisations.
The iLAB’s role is to offer these newsrooms/civic watchdogs a robust toolkit of open source intelligence (OSINT) leads and resources, along with investigative support for identifying and exposing disinformation and other influence operations intended to undermine our democracies and our economies, often by creating social discord or polarisation. Your duties will be managing projects. You will help build their teams and shape their systems and improve their products. You will work with the project teams to ensure that partnerships and project deliverables are met and that stakeholders are kept informed and engaged.
The iLAB also actively gathers evidence on corruption and organised crime affecting the public sector, and transforms the information into actionable data to help civic watchdogs and investigative media better understand the nexus between politically exposed/influential people (PEPs and PIPs) and organised crime networks, and their role in subverting public resources.
We operate in a fast-paced environment, so you will need to be agile in your management approach, quick to understand and learn new things, and creative in finding solutions to any problems that arise. You will also need obsessive attention to detail and be comfortable handling multiple tasks and deadlines.
Key Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include:
- Manage iLAB’s editorial calendar, production pipelines, and delivery workflows, ensuring deadlines are consistently met and content moves efficiently from draft to publication.
- Plan and track investigative projects and editorial outputs using structured project management tools, coordinating across writers, analysts, and editorial leadership.
- Run weekly planning meetings, including the ‘insights diary’ to prioritise stories, allocate tasks, and monitor progress across ongoing investigations.
- Design and maintain processes, checklists, and templates to support team productivity and content consistency.
- Track team progress against goals, flag bottlenecks, and keep deliverables on schedule, escalating issues where necessary.
- Serve as a bridge between analysts, editors, and stakeholders, ensuring clear task assignment, expectations, and alignment.
- Work closely with editors to translate forensic research into deliverable milestones, ensuring structured timelines for reviews, edits, and publishing.
- Maintain clean records of workflows, team progress, publishing calendars, and production metrics for internal reporting and accountability.
How to apply:
Please fill in this form by 10 June 2025
About Us:
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of indigenous African civic technology and investigative data journalism laboratories, with over 120 staff in 26 countries, who build digital democracy solutions that are intended to give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthen civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
This includes building infrastructure such as the continent’s largest open data portal, open.AFRICA, and largest open source civic software portal, commons.AFRICA, as well as the largest repository of investigative document-based evidence, source.AFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network that gives citizens their own ‘eyes in the sky’, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in 12 African countries, and the sensors.AFRICA remote-sensing citizen science initiative to combat air/water pollution.
CfA also incubates the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), as an association of the continent’s best investigative newsrooms, ranging from large traditional mainstream media to smaller specialist units. ANCIR member newsrooms investigate crooked politicians, organised crime and big business. The iLAB is ANCIR’s in-house digital forensic unit, with teams in east, south and west Africa. ANCIR uses its resources to strengthen newsrooms’ own internal capacity, by providing access to the world’s best whistleblower encryption and investigative semantic analysis technologies, as well as skills development, and seed grants for cross-border collaboration.
At CfA, we don’t just accept differences – we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. CfA is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
To all recruitment agencies: CfA does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our employment application line, CfA employees or any other CfA contact. CfA is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Please note: Due to high volumes of applications, we are unable to respond to each one individually. If you are selected for an interview, we will contact you.