Journalism Education in Africa: A Review of Excellence in Practice in 10 Countries

Background/Context

There is a growing awareness of the uniqueness of African media, and of the need to try and define what “African media/journalism” is and looks like, alongside a recognition that this might be different in countries across the continent (Mabweazara, 2018). This awareness is rooted in an appreciation of the practical evolution of different media ecosystems and even forms of journalism in countries, including, for example, in the use of indigenous languages in news-making. It also reflects the reality that journalism happens on the continent in starkly differently-resourced environments, which implies different kinds of risk-taking and innovation to create the news. Inevitably this awareness provokes historical debates of normative “Western” notions of journalism, the media versus state nexus, the role of journalists in development in post-liberation societies on the continent, and, more recently, ideas such as decolonizing the curriculum (in this case the journalism curriculum). Alongside debates about decoloniality, the unique role the media might play in the African context and a global appreciation that many news outlets could work better in the public interest, is also being expressed through the exploration by scholars and others on the continent of the usefulness of alternative approaches to journalism such as constructive journalism, solutions journalism, public-facing or “relational” journalism and sustainable journalism (Mabweazara, 2018), as an answer to hegemonic notions of journalism based on objectivity or the so-called “watchdog” role of the media. Yet these debates and this awareness occur in tandem with an appreciation by many African media scholars and trainers that there is something in the formal idea of journalism as it has historically developed that needs to be preserved or even rescued. There is still value in the normative idea of a general set of standards of practice all journalists and thus journalism scholars and educators ought to adhere to—an appreciation that is part of the evolving historical debates over identity and the positioning of the media in the post-colonial African landscape. While these ideas are differently expressed, they often can be distilled to adherence to ethical rules of conduct, standards of editorial practice such as fact-checking and sourcing, and even codes of public service or working in the public’s interest. However, beyond practical rules such as checking facts and sourcing properly, the exact content of these normative ideas is not necessarily fixed. For some, even an “African” set of normative standards or universal “journalistic practices” would be difficult to adopt, given the sometimes vast disparities and differences between regions and countries on the continent, particularly where resources, cultural, and even political norms are concerned. As others have noted, the idea of democracy itself is not fixed, and multiple variations are in practice and contested across the world (Fourie, 2011). Therefore, how journalists are expected to work to support democracy—or even if they should—is likely to vary in subtle and not-so-subtle ways depending on the country dynamics.

These tensions were recognized in the 2006 project by UNESCO, which acknowledged the contextual differences faced by universities and was cognizant of the “fact that excellence and potential might well vary in terms of African sub-regional standards and needs” (Kyazze & Berger, 2008). Moreover, as others have argued, in considering what defines excellence, one needs to remain alive to the nuances presented by cultural differences and the modifications necessary within cultures to make journalism practice of any kind viable in different contexts (Skjerdal, 2009). As Skjerdal put it, the “uncritical” and wholesale export of certain journalistic values does not work in practice, it is only through considered and context-specific adaptation that some universal values and practices can be shared. Acknowledging the complexities this introduced, in the 2006 “centres of excellence” study, institutions that offered academic and skills-based journalism training were nevertheless ranked, with gaps for development noted. It was also a phased project, involving a basic mapping of the players in the field, an online brainstorm with African journalism schools about the criteria to be used to determine what the project called a “potential” center of excellence, and a call for data based on these criteria from any institution that wished to be considered as such a center. In many cases, this led to a follow-up site visit from the project implementers for further discussions (Berger, 2008, p. 150). Twelve institutions were, in the end, determined to be “potential centres of excellence.” It was primarily this ranking and inevitable solidification of the idea of “excellence” that we wished to avoid in the 2022 project or, if possible, better respond to.

There were also notable contextual differences between the period in which the 2006 project was implemented and the situation in 2022 that shaped the project process and outcomes. A key one was the significant difference in internet access on the continent, and, consequently, the widespread use of social media, as well as the potential for distance or hybrid learning methodologies that gained particular traction during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2006, only 3% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had internet connectivity, compared to 37% in 2023 (World Bank, 2023). The internet, among other factors, had also resulted in the gradual dissipation of the traditional media model of print and broadcast dominating the information landscape, a symptom being the gradual weakening of print media in many countries, and a shift to online media production in various forms. Outside of newsrooms, individuals, NGOs, online start-ups, among others, now also produced and published news through multiple online channels. The traditional media simultaneously faced a crisis of trust and credibility in many countries, as much as they faced the challenge of financial sustainability. Journalism ethics, corruption, and basic skills were brought into question in countries across the continent, and needs such as fact-checking interventions were seen as acutely required in a growing information disorder.

Project Analysis

The 2022 project did not seek to make broad assumptions about “excellence” in journalism education in Africa but rather sought to engage educators in co-creating a framework for what “excellence” might look like in different African contexts. This shared sense of “excellence” needed to be both nuanced, and broad enough to be relevant to these different realities. This meant trying to develop criteria that were as useful to the teaching of journalism in an under-resourced media environment, as they would be to a school training journalists in a highly networked urban center in a country with a strong economy; or as useful for a country riven by ongoing civil war, as they would be teaching journalism in a largely peaceful democracy. While we wanted to emphasize practical training, which our prior work had identified as a very important component of journalism training in Africa, we did not want to prejudice under-resourced schools. This meant that excellence in journalism education was not fixed on the level of resources and infrastructures a school had, but rather on its adaptability, outreach, and the ability to work fruitfully as part of the media and development ecology and economy in which it operated. This suggested a measure of risk-taking and innovation in practice to be responsive to a local environment’s needs, opportunities and limitations. This risk-taking, innovation and energy of outreach was closer to our notion of “excellence” than counting the number of students trained by a school, whether or not it had a radio studio on premises, or how many laptops it had in its media room. Finally, we wanted to explicitly frame the criteria in the context of human rights and place a strong emphasis on media freedoms. While this may seem like an obvious framing, by making media freedoms explicit in the criteria, we hoped to encourage schools that did not yet do this to locate their teaching in a political context, and to emphasize that in many ways journalism training is a form of human rights advocacy. This in itself may imply some risk-taking for journalism schools operating in authoritarian or anti-democratic contexts, or with rights-infringing laws in place. The five online consultations which were held focused on the five regions in Africa—Southern, East, West, Central, and North Africa. As mentioned, over 100 journalism educators and trainers participated in these consultations, resulting in perspectives from educators and trainers in 69% of the countries in Africa being shared. The conversations in the five consultations were rich and wide-ranging, with both specific and general issues raised. Among the key issues discussed were:

The final criteria which were developed following the consultations had five sections, which defined excellence in journalism education in Africa as:

Each of these top-level criteria had sub-sections dealing with “curriculum,” “outreach,” and “internal development and capacity,” with questions for each sub-section. In this regard, the sub-sections were not identical but reflected similar areas of interest and inquiry to the categories developed by the 2006 study. A total of 58 questions were included in the final criteria. A number of the questions—such as whether or not a school offered “structured support to develop the basic writing and editing skills of students”—were predictable, and the consultations simply served to confirm that thi need was widely felt among journalism educators. However, as the example questions extracted from Criteria 2 show (see box), the consultations shed light on many nuanced issues that most educators felt were necessary to introduce in their classrooms across countries in Africa. The final criteria can be read on the following page: https://www.unesco.org/en/criteria-excellence-journalism-education-africa.

General Trends Observable Through the Results of the Self-Assessment Questionnaire

The responses to the self-assessment questionnaire depended on the perceptions of the person completing the questionnaire, and therefore the results are an indication of how that individual rated his or her institution in terms of the criteria. The questionnaire was not in this respect an external evaluation where the evaluator ensures consistency in how scoring is done across different contexts; nor was there any requirement that individuals completing the questionnaire, who were expected to be either the head of department or a senior staff member in a school, conferred with others in the school. No training to ensure inter-rater reliability was conducted, although many of the responding institutions had participated in the development of the criteria through the online consultations, and therefore would have had a working understanding of what we were trying to achieve. There was some objective criteria to the scoring—such as whether an internal policy had been developed, whether the institution had partnerships with particular stakeholders, whether an institution taught or offered a course on a topic, or whether it had a campus radio station, student newspaper or online platform for practical training—but the quality of that policy or teaching, or the strength of those partnerships was not evaluated other than through the respondents’ scoring. This means that the scores between the institutions are not directly comparable in the way that a question that asks how many computers institutions have in their training rooms might be. The purpose of the of the questionnaire, however, was twofold: first, to raise awareness among institutions about where there may be strengths and weaknesses in their own institutional processes and training (for which self-assessment is well-suited); and second, to see, despite the methodological weaknesses, if the scoring results might shed some light on the general trends in journalism education on the continent at the time the questionnaire was completed. The highest score possible for the questionnaire, where each question was rated 5 (or “You feel your teaching responds very well to the issue identified and that there is little room for improvement”), was 290. As can be seen from the graph below, most respondents scored their institutions above the median of 145, but the data tends steadily but surely toward the median after the highest self-assessment score of 252. It then dips below the median for about a fifth of the respondents. When broken down into the regions, the graph suggests that the top-scoring institutions from Central Africa, East Africa and West Africa tended to rate themselves somewhat higher than the top-scoring institutions from Southern and North Africa. The highest scoring institution was from Central Africa (252) and the lowest from North Africa (73). The graph also suggests that there are sharp differences between the self-evaluations of institutions in Central Africa and North Africa. This could be a result of the different number of respondents for these regions (a higher number of respondents may have produced different results) or suggest substantial disparities between the training offerings of institutions in the two regions. In contrast, a similar gradient between the scorings from institutions in Southern Africa, East Africa and West Africa is seen. However, overall, the graph suggests that institutions are likely to score themselves somewhere between the median of 145 and 250, with only some below the median, regardless of the region, with the suggestion of more responsive curricula evident in institutions across both West and East Africa, although there remains room for improvement (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Total Scores for the Questionnaire for Institutions by Region.

The Table 1 below includes the five top-level criteria, together with the sub-criteria headings. Using a simple percentage calculation, it captures how many questions in each sub-criteria were scored at the median answer (taken as 3 out of 5) or above. The table gives a snapshot indication of where, in general, there is room for strengthening journalism training in schools among the respondents, and where there are strengths that can be leveraged.

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Table 1.

Percentage of Institutions That Scored Themselves at the Median and Above for Each Criteria and Sub-Criteria.

Criteria	Curriculum (% scoring 3 or above)	Outreach (% scoring 3 or above)	Internal capacity (% scoring 3 or above)
Human rights	88	25	0
Practical training needs	50	66	0
Innovation and trends	50	100	0
Socio-economic and political environment	50	0	0
Nuances of African media ecologies	75	0	0

Source: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2024).

On average, the journalism schools that responded to the questionnaire show a particular strength in emphasizing human rights in their training programs. This includes engaging students in what journalism means to citizenship, democracy, human rights, and sustainable development; unpacking the right of freedom of expression and access to information; introducing students to the media industry’s codes of conduct and practice, and the rights and obligations these entail; and teaching students how to report fairly, sensitively and in a non-partisan and non-discriminatory way during elections and in conflict situations (including civil wars and religious and ethnic conflict). Institutions were however, stronger in teaching than in outreach (e.g., hosting media freedom events), and very little internal capacity was built in this area. There were also some gaps in the schools attending to the practical training needs of students, including for example, offering training in newsroom leadership specifically for women students, and making students aware of the psychological impact their work may have on them and the resources and networks available to support them. Issues to do with workplace survival skills, such as negotiating with editors, and labour rights were also poorly represented, as was training in digital and personal security, dealing with sources, and on how to cope with threats they may face when reporting in the field. This could reflect the industry-training disconnect discussed in literature on media education in Africa, however, a number of schools who participated in the online consultations were very aware of this disconnect, and already had mechanisms in place in an attempt to practically bridge the divide. A notable example is the Faculty of Journalism, Media and Communication at Uganda Christian University, which has strong relationships with the media industry, including staff sitting on boards. Editors and journalists guest lecture and provide feedback on faculty course content, and staff regularly write for the media. (Finlay, 2020). Instead, what these specific gaps suggest is that many of these issues are not taken seriously in the workplace itself—such as female leadership, psychological stresses, that editors need to be engaged when they issue a story brief, or refuse to cover an event, and even union rights—and that trainers needed to look beyond industry norms of practice to properly empower students.

Schools fared better in the sub-category of “outreach” in terms of practical training needs, suggesting that they recognized the need to work with others outside of their institutions to achieve practical teaching outcomes. Similarly, the results suggest that schools tend to look outside of their institutions to respond to the need to train students in innovation and trends in media practice. There were however, gaps in outreach. For instance, despite strong examples where relationships with the media community—journalists, editors and NGOs—had been built, working relationships with specialist thematic communities were generally weak. For example, to the question “Does your school: Have strong working relationships with specialist communities for teaching relevant specialisations, such as on the environment/climate change, migration, corruption, health, economics, or politics,” was on average scored low. While schools felt they responded well to introducing students to the nuances of African media ecologies there was little by way of outreach in this area, which included the important task of publishing research and case studies on the unique forms of journalism found in Africa for wider public dissemination, or regularly seeking to engage the producers of new forms of news and journalism, including influencers and YouTubers.

Overall, the results show that most journalism schools that responded to the questionnaire “run a course on journalism ethics, with components that include notions of fairness, verification and fact-checking, and balance in reporting in the public ‘interest’” (Criterion 1). It also showed that the least number of schools “offer short courses on journalism practice and principles for journalists who work in indigenous languages” (Criterion 5), which was identified as a critical gap in training for many journalism schools on the continent during the consultations. The results also show that schools need to pay much more attention to internal capacity building requirements overall to respond properly to the five criteria. For example, this sub-criteria included the question: “Has your school: Developed a practical policy on staff and students commenting publicly on issues to do with media freedoms that gives them the freedom to voice their concerns but also preserves a sense of academic independence and impartiality.” This was an issue raised for debate in the consultations, which on average, schools scored themselves low on.

“Excellence” in Practice

The second phase of the project involved selecting 10 schools or centers from the proposals we received for small grant funding. The chosen proposals illustrated our sense as project organizers of wanting to co-create a framework for excellence that was responsive to the country-specific dynamics and contexts in which journalism schools worked. The grants were awarded to the institutions listed in the Table 2 below:

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Table 2.

Schools That Were Awarded a Grant and the Topic Areas That Their Proposals Covered.

Country	Schools	Focus
Cameroon	Department of Communication, Université de Douala	Building data journalism capacity
Democratic Republic of the Congo	Department of Journalism, Université Bilingue du Congo	Strengthening environmental journalism
Eswatini	Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Eswatini	Building data journalism capacity
Ethiopia	Department of Journalism and Communications, Bahir Dar University	Gender-sensitive reporting in post-conflict societies
Ghana	University of Media, Arts and Communication—Institute of Journalism (UniMAC-IJ)	Institutionalizing gender-sensitivity in the classroom and newsrooms
Kenya	Institute of Social Communication, Tangaza University College	Strengthening environmental journalism
Malawi	Department of Journalism and Media Studies, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS)	Developing a sustainability model for community radio
Morocco	Institut Supérieur de l’Information et de la Communication (ISIC) / Center de Recherches et d’Education aux Médias (CREM)	Developing a platform for digital media training
Namibia	Department of Journalism and Media Technology, Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST)	Strengthening the representation in media and in university curricula of marginalized and indigenous communities
South Africa	Fraycollege	Strengthening media entrepreneurialism and sustainability

Using the grants of USD15,500 each, implementation of the projects ran between November 2023 and March 2024. Some of the high-level outcomes for the projects included but were not limited to: upskilling teaching staff in specialist areas and building the project management confidence of staff members; revitalizing and creating new curricula and helping schools catalyze leadership in new teaching domains; fostering relationships with the media industry and with underrepresented communities; and creating platforms and avenues for long-term engagement and deep dialogue. At least 1414 students, working journalists and teaching staff and faculty members benefited positively from the ten projects as attested to in the reports and photographic evidence produced for the project administrators (UNESCO, 2024). A total of 735 of these were journalism students and 556 working journalists. One journalist who participated in the environmental journalism capacity building workshop run by the Université Bilingue du Congo even wrote a poem to express his gratitude and enthusiasm after the workshop. Also showing the positive reception to the Tangaza University College’s intervention on environmental journalism a student said: “Participating [in the environmental reporting project] was eye-opening. It has taught me the power of storytelling and community engagement in advocating for environmental change . . . It is experiences like these that shape us into advocates for sustainable journalism.” Meanwhile, a station manager at Mzimba Community Radio Station, who participated in MUBAS’s research outreach to develop a sustainability model for community radio, spoke about the intervention opening him up to “diverse perspectives” and the importance of “fostering community engagement” as well as “having a resilient space for independent reporting amid challenges,” NUST’s project involved field trips with students to a San community in Donkerbos in the Omaheke Region, and OvaHimba communities in the Kunene Region. As one second-year student suggested, field trips such as these are invaluable educational tools, with many students starting their professional careers with little working knowledge of the communities they could be writing about:

My experience was eye opening, because I thought I would see the San people in their traditional attire and staying in their traditional houses (huts) but to my surprise it was different as they wear clothes similar to ours. The community members are also so cheerful and when they greet you they do so with a smile.

Another important outcome of their project was the potential for sustainable relationships being built between the institution and the communities, with informal communications ongoing between community leaders and staff after the field visits.

Reflection/Conclusion

Although the criteria were intended as a tool for schools to self-assess their journalism programs, it became clear that they also served as a kind of advocacy document of what both good journalism and newsroom practice, and journalism education entailed in Africa from a human rights perspective. This did not mean only teaching students about ethics and media freedoms, but, for instance, teaching them how to report in a non-discriminatory way during elections and in conflict situations, and how to report ethically and sensitively on the rights of women, children and marginalized groups such as ethnic groups, people with disabilities and sexual minorities. It also meant journalism schools strengthening outreach and links with the media and activists, and to be outspoken on media rights issues—for some academics and universities, this was something quite new and provoked complexities around notions of academic impartiality and the risks involved. The criteria also implied journalism schools taking new risks to respond more readily to the training needs of journalists working in their countries and regions, and to actively support journalists as they confront power where it needed to be confronted; not just the power of the state or businesses or others they are reporting on, but in the newsroom too—whether of editors or the news institution. The empowerment of women journalists was also a significant part of the criteria, as well as the strengthening of inclusion for minority and marginalized groups in the classroom. Resources can be and often are important in offering good journalism education given that journalistic practice is crucially technologically based, and may require a radio studio, TV cameras, smartphones, and high-speed broadband internet to teach well. However, our criteria posit that these should not be overemphasized when determining excellence, and that a school’s creative risk-taking, innovation and energy of outreach is much more important when considering its value to the practice of journalism in any context. For example, in the absence of technological resources, the criteria asks about sustainable arrangements with external partners where this practical experience can be found or facilities shared—perhaps an NGO, a community radio station, or even a commercial newsroom. Such arrangements may benefit students differently and bear their own unexpected fruits over time. The point is to move away from technology and resources pre-determining our evaluation of what excellence in journalism education entails, and in this way to exclude the excellent teaching that occurs in extremely under-resourced environments, when we know that the spirit of teaching more than anything else is likely to be a greater influence on the student’s professional future. Perhaps a last thought that arises from the experience of communicating and gathering insights over a period of time with this number of educators from across the continent, is that, despite our rapid shift toward internet-based forms of communication, many educators are still quite isolated from their African peers. While this particular iteration of the UNESCO excellence project managed to reach further afield and involve more schools and training institutions, it still underlines the fact that communications and interactions across the continent and its regions are complicated by cultural, linguistic and even resource differences, such as the ability to travel. As one Portuguese-speaking educator in Mozambique put it during the course of our project, to be “heard” academically, he had to write in English and publish in English journals. While the dominant language of a region orientates the scholarly work being done there toward the former colonial power, or in the case of North Africa toward other Arabic-speaking countries outside of Africa, previous research has also shown that schools tend to look to Europe (e.g., Francophone countries to France) and Latin America (e.g., Lusophone countries to Brazil) for their institutional partnerships, rather than to others on the continent itself (Finlay, 2020). For many who participated in the consultations, it felt like the beginning of a conversation—much more needed to be shared and learned from each other. A happy development has been increasing interaction between the media scholarly communities of West Africa, East Africa (EACA) and Southern Africa (Sacomm), and more recently those associations have been sending delegates to each other’s annual conferences which greatly enhances conversations and collaboration. The African Journalism Educators’ Network is also having a very positive impact by strengthening these bonds by connecting journalism teachers directly to each other and holding annual events with targeted content (often alongside the regional conferences). However, it became clear during the research phase of this project that engagements with Central Africa and North Africa are difficult enterprises, with the fewest participants coming from these regions, in particularly North Africa. While not negating the importance of these link-ups abroad, it also suggests the need for educators to turn inwards, to each other, where important experiences and research needs to be shared and co-learning nurtured.

Finally, it is noteworthy that communications were made difficult during the project with Bahir Dar University after the internet was blocked due to a state of emergency declared after conflict in the Amhara Region where the university is based. After project closure, a project-related publication that the Department of Journalism at the Université Bilingue du Congo was producing out of its own energy was halted due to the advance of rebels in that country. These experiences show the extent to which journalism education is done in vastly different contexts across countries on the continent, and the ability to sustain good journalism training under these conditions needs to be incorporated into any concept of excellence. Despite its shortcomings, the UNESCO project into excellence did draw together an unusual number of educators from all the continent’s regions and the topic of “excellence” allowed for rich, insightful conversations about how educators grapple with their contexts and also how they long for a universal, guiding sense of journalism’s valuable role in the world.