[CLOSED] Trainer: Train and mentor partner newsrooms and media houses

Do you want to help equip newsrooms and civic watchdogs to combat misinformation across Africa?

Code for Africa (CfA) has an immediate vacancy for a full-time Trainer to join the continent’s largest fact-checking team: PesaCheck.

The successful candidate will have demonstrable experience in peer training/mentoring, preferably in fact-checking or analytical journalism organisations, and will also have a talent for community management.

Fluency in English is essential, but candidates with additional proficiency in Arabic and/or French as international languages, as well as major African languages like Fula/Fulani, Hausa, Kiswahili or Yoruba will have an advantage.

PesaCheck is the continent’s largest indigenous fact-checking initiative, with teams in 13 African countries, and a network of partner CheckDesks at media across the continent. PesaCheck researches and debunks misinformation published both online and elsewhere in more traditional media, resulting in platforms like Facebook labelling/removing over five million harmful posts per year. It also tracks promises by public officials and shines a light on public finances to ensure the public is not misled.

PesaCheck is part of a wider CfA network of digital democracy initiatives, which also includes the African Fact-Checking Alliance (AFCA) that currently supports 144 newsrooms in 16 African countries, providing technical training, hands-on mentoring and digital tools for combating toxic content.

The successful candidate will work with PesaCheck’s training editor and CfA’s Academy experts, as well as a larger multinational and multilingual team using digital collaboration tools to grow this work even further.

Required minimum requirements include:

Bachelor’s degree or significant real-world experience in journalism, communications, media studies, political studies, or a related field.
At least two years of experience as a trainer, technical skills coach, journalism mentor or related position.
Experience developing training programme schedules and presentations
Experience in delivery of training across multiple platforms, including but not limited to, in-person, one-on-one and online trainings, as well as in individual mentorship
Able to get across complex details in an understandable and accurate way.
Able to multitask, prioritise, and manage time efficiently.
Able to work creatively and accurately under pressure with excellent attention to detail.
Organised and able to create, manage and oversee multiple timelines and schedules.

Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:

Demonstrable experience in fact-checking, OSINT (open source intelligence) investigations or investigative/analytical journalism.
4+ years of experience as a trainer, technical skills coach , or related position.
Experience and/or certification in training in adult learning methods, facilitation, and/or instructional design
Experience developing and compiling training programme curricula
Possess the sensitivity to understand cross-cultural dynamics
Relationships with universities, statistics organisations and media houses
Experience working with international partners and team members.

Language and Location Requirements:

Location: CfA’s major hub offices are in Nairobi (Kenya), Lagos (Nigeria), Cape Town (South Africa), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Kampala (Uganda). CfA also has in-country teams in 14 other African countries.
PesaCheck’s current focal countries are: Bénin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.
While applicants from these territories are preferred, the role can be performed remotely, and applicants across Africa will therefore be considered.
Languages: English AND French
Preferred but not required: Any official/major language spoken in any African country where CfA operates.

About this role

The successful candidate will join CfA’s PesaCheck team, which is responsible for helping the public separate fact from fiction by using a range of journalistic techniques and digital verification tools.

You will work closely with PesaCheck’s Training Editor and Special Projects Editor, with support from CfA’s Academy team, to develop practical conceptualise and develop training materials and course content for CfA’s MOOC platform that are customised to the African countries where CfA operates. You will use this courseware to spearhead workshops for partner newsrooms across the continent, and to mentor individual trainees so that they can use their new skills to fact-check misinformation in the real world. You will also, from time to time, conduct internal training to upskill staff both at PesaCheck and across CfA’s other programmes. Training and mentorship will take place online and in-person, and will be structured as both group and individual sessions.

The ideal candidate will have strong training skills and be a knowledgeable journalist with an understanding of the mis-/disinformation space, a political or financial background, and a deep knowledge of the media landscape in your country and/or region.

We operate in a fast-paced environment, so you will need to quickly understand and learn new things. You will also need to possess a keen attention to detail. You should be comfortable handling multiple tasks with multiple ongoing deadlines and should have previous experience working on the digital collaboration tools that CfA uses, such as Slack, Google Drive, and Trello.

Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include:

Assist the Training Editor to understand the journalistic fact-checking training needs both with partner organisations and internal CfA teams.
Assist with developing experiential (learn-by-doing) training materials and class exercises on fact-checking skills, as well as on the technical research/data tools used by fact-checking teams in newsrooms.
Assist partners to develop realistic training or mentorship schedules and training targets, to ensure that mid-career journalists are able to accommodate their training with their other newsroom duties.
Assist in project managing the resulting training partnerships, including vetting/selecting participants, assisting with pre-/post training surveys and skills tests and tracking other impact metrics.
Actively mentor and motivate training participants to help implement their new skills/tools, and to help ensure timely submission of assistments or other course deliverables.
Assist with monitoring participants’s progress and compiling regular progress reports that highlight outcomes and insights about the training’s effectiveness.
Work proactively with the wider CfA strategy teams to think critically about ways to update and improve training methodology and materials using evaluation data from the participants as well as international best practices and trends.

What We Offer:

A competitive salary, subject to experience, with opportunities for performance-based growth, both in terms of career path and public stature.
A dynamic workplace, with a transnational team, occasional international travel, and generous vacation benefits.
Ongoing opportunities to learn new cutting-edge skills and techniques/technologies to future-proof yourself in a rapidly evolving industry.
A chance to shine on a global stage, writing for international audiences and interacting with colleagues around the world.

How to Apply:

Please complete this form by 28 January 2022

About Us:

Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of indigenous African civic technology and investigative data journalism laboratories, with over 84 staff in 20 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.