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Code for Ghana project takes off




By: Fred Yaw Sarpong

Web Foundation and Mobile Web Ghana have initiated a project called Code for Ghana (CFG) which allows people who know how to work with data and use the data to produce meaningful stories for media houses.

The project will embed data fellows in media houses to support journalist to use date to tell stories.

Project Manager for Code for Ghana, Florence Toffa told Daily Express that the essence of the project is for the citizens to be able to engage the government on certain specific discussions.

‘We hope that this project will enable government to be more open to the public while the citizens will know certain specific issues or projects going on in the country,’ said Toffa.

She said that they will be engaging the data developers for five months and host them at Mobile Web Ghana but ‘after that we will embed them in some media houses for a period of six months. These data fellows will be working with the media houses to produce meaningful stories for the media houses.’

The initiators believe that there are no enough applications that will connect the citizens to the government and this project is to bridge that gap.

Through this initiative these data developers will also develop simple local applications for people to interact with government, communities and others key institutions in the country.

Toffa noted that these data fellows will also train the journalist while attached to the media house. This will allow the journalist learn some of these tools and be able to use them accordingly.

‘The Journalist role is to be able to produce meaningful stories. But how does the journalist do that with the advent of technology’?

‘So the Journalist will be working with someone who knows and can transfer that knowledge. We hope that after the data fellows are out of the media houses either they will be absolve by the media house or a Journalist or someone can be an advocate to use technology to bring innovation to the news room. There will be transfer of knowledge as the programme comes to an end,’ she stated.

She said that in future they hope to scale this application into local government programmes where they will collect data or information and disseminate them to the public.


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