Application Open for African Forum on Youth Skills & Enterprise in the Digital Age!

Deadline: 4 September 2017

Applications are open for African Forum on Youth Skills & Enterprise in the Digital Age that will bring together senior policymakers, government administration senior officials, development partners, private sector, representatives of African youth, young entrepreneurs, civil society and experts to showcase, share and discuss comprehensive and innovative TVSD/TVET models and programmes.

The program’s aim is to develop the leadership and digital skills of the youth and equipping them with the necessary knowledge, tools and know-how to design marketable products and services and, therefore, create sustainable enterprises and generate employment.

Expected Outcomes

• Developing a shared and commanding understanding of how digital technologies can be leveraged for skilling the youth and empowering them to create entreprise in the digital era and lead the socio-economic transformation of their communities.
• Sharing knowledge, experiences, good practices and lessons learnt to better inform policies and programmes aiming at skilling the youth and entreprise creation in the digital age.
• Raising awareness on the necessity to build strong skill sets and volunteer political commitment to explore innovative approches for leveraging digital technologies for youth skilling and entreprise creation.
• Promoting youth digital skills and entreprise high level policy dialogue platform and network that includes the public sector (ministries, agencies and institutions in charge of vocational education and youth, Regional Economic Communities – RECs); development cooperation agencies and international organizations; private sector; civil society and youth organizations. Such a policy platform and network are necessary for the development of the ecosystem that will foster partnerships to advance policy and strategy development and implementation.
• Sharing Youth’s digital skills development and entreprise creation strategies to help address youth unemployment and bridging the skills gap within Africa by identifying game-changing experiences and lessons learnt.
• Creating a platform for the promotion of the comptetivieness and attractiveness of TVET sectors across Africa by identifying innovative and creative skills through an “African creative skills competition”.

Eligibility Criteria

Around 100-120 participants are expected to attend the Forum:

• Government ministers in charge of Education, TVET, youth and employment;
• Representatives of leading international, regional organizations, private sector and civil society (African youth and young entrepreneurs);
• Youth organizations;
• TVET centres;

How to Apply

Proposals must be submitted via email at the address given on the website.

Eligible Countries: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the, Cote d’Ivorie, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

For more information, please visit African Forum.

InSight Crime seeks bilingual editors [Latin America]

Bilingual editors can apply for this job position.

InSight Crime, an investigative think tank focusing on organized crime in the Americas, is looking for English and Spanish language editors to oversee content production on its English and Spanish language websites.

Editors should be able to draft and implement strategy for the websites to ensure maximum reach and impact, help manage a bilingual newsroom with staff writers and editors producing content in both English and Spanish, and steer selection of long-term investigations on organized crime in the region, among other duties.

Ideal candidates have 10 years of journalism experience and/or think tank work, have knowledge and experience covering organized crime and citizen security, and are willing to relocate to Medellín, Colombia, where InSight Crime is based. 

Apply now.

For more information, click here.

Contest for video on popular science open [Russia]

Russian video bloggers, journalists, scientists, students and anyone interested in popularization of science can apply for this contest.

The Russian TV channel Science has launched a contest for short popular videos about science.

Videos must not be longer than 5 minutes. The contest categories are: "experiment," "scientific phenomenon," "lifehack," "infographics" and "Science 360."

The best videos will be featured in the Science channel's programs.

The deadline is Oct. 2.

For more information (in Russian), click here

IBM: Inviting Applicants to Support their Climate Change or Environmental Projects

Deadline: 15 September 2017

The IBM is currently inviting applicants to apply for free crowdsourced supercomputing power, weather data and cloud storage to support their climate or environmental research project. They welcome scientists around the world.

Through World Community Grid, Applicants computational research calculations are distributed to thousands of volunteers around the world who perform these calculations on their computer or Android devices. In doing so, they get 24/7 access to up to 150,000 years of distributed computing power.

IBM Resources

• Crowdsourced computing power
  • Scientists can receive free, 24/7 access to up to 150,000 years of computing power though World Community Grid, an award-winning IBM Citizenship initiative that enables anyone with a computer or Android device to support scientific research by carrying out computational research tasks on their devices.
• Weather data
  • The historical and real-time weather data of The Weather Company, an IBM business, can help advance their understanding of environmental systems and support the design of solutions to prevent, mitigate against and adapt to climate change.
• Cloud storage
  • If applicants work on environmental research initiatives with very large data sets, IBM Cloud storage for their IBM-supported project could give they a scalable platform to store and analyze the results of their virtual experiments on World Community Grid and conduct further investigations.

Eligibility Criteria

Successful proposals will:

• Be not for profit: conducted by public or nonprofit organizations
• Tackle climate change: Advance understanding of the impacts of climate change, and/or strategies to adapt to or mitigate the impacts of climate change.
• Contribute to open science: all data generated by World Community Grid volunteers must be made freely available to the scientific community
• Be enabled, accelerated or enhanced by the resources we offer: climate or environmental computational studies that require significant computer processing power and can be divided into small independent computations, may need weather data, and/or could benefit from large amounts of cloud-based storage.

Selection Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated for:

• Scientific merit
• Potential to contribute to the global community’s understanding of specific climate change and environmental science challenges
• Capacity of the research team to manage a sustained research project
• Demonstrated need for IBM resources

How to Apply

For more information, please visit IBM.

Why journalists need data and coding skills more than ever

By Jessica Cruz

Knowing how to use data to report stories remains an in-demand skill for journalists across the globe, experts said during Brazil’s 12th Congress of Investigative Journalism. The event featured more than 10 workshops, panels and lectures about the latest developments in data journalism, as well as plenty of advice for those just getting started in this field.

“Even in countries where it’s hard to get decent data, there are people exploring, finding something,” explained Simon Rogers, the data editor at Google. “Every government in the world has data, even Afghanistan.”

Marco Túlio Pires, the Google News Lab lead for Brazil and Latin America, said that journalists have a responsibility to explore open source databases, seeking stories that otherwise wouldn’t be evident, while also pressuring the government to make more data available online.

“We are not expecting that any regular citizen will dig into these databases, but journalists are being paid for it,” he said. “As journalists we cannot give up, we have to push and push the government to release [datasets]. That is our job, right?”

Pires recommended that those interested in getting started with data journalism should take online courses in order to learn the basics. Organizations like Internews in Africa and Asia, School of Data, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, Hong Kong University and many others in the Middle East can be helpful starting points for finding these courses.

“If a journalist doesn’t have easy access to internet, it is going to be a little more complicated, but some organizations offer itinerant courses,” Pires said. “School of Data and Internews are two examples. They go to places like Afghanistan and Somalia to train local journalists.”

Pires also stressed that knowing the basics of coding is becoming a necessity for journalists who work with data.

“I would recommend Python because it is easy to learn, but it can be any language, whether it’s Javascript, Ruby or C++,” he said. “The journalist doesn’t have to be an expert, but if he knows how to talk to the computer, it will give to him an autonomy that is unprecedented.”

One example of using coding to drive an investigation is a 2013 ProPublica app, which analyzes which content is most likely to be censored on Chinese social media site Sina Weibo. A ProPublica team created software which monitored 100 Sina Weibo accounts over a 12-day period, and found that more than 5 percent of their posts were deleted by censors.

This is the kind of story that would have otherwise been impossible to do if journalists didn’t know how to create and then use the necessary software, Pires said.

Expanding the range of stories that journalists can pursue is one reason why it’s so crucial for news companies to invest in data journalism training, he argued. Doing so “is going to put journalism inside the technology revolution,” he added.

Knowing how to code can also help journalists tackle projects with massive datasets (Excel can fit more than a million rows of data, but that may not be enough for some stories). Coding can also help journalists automate repetitive processes like downloading countless spreadsheets.

“I’m code uneducated,” said Natália Mazotte, cofounder of Gênero e Número (Gender and Number), a Brazilian news site that uses data to explore gender inequality. “But learning to code is the same as learning a new language. It will take years, but if you understand at least what that code is saying to you, it is great. Many people give up at the very first step.”

Journalists should attempt to “interview” their datasets just as they would a human source, Mazotte advised. Before deciding whether you’re going to tell your story through maps, charts or other kinds of visualizations, it’s crucial that journalists first understand what story they want to tell, other experts said.

“You have to interview your database first,” Pires said. “When you understand the answers, that is the point when you are going to think, ‘How am I gonna tell that story?’”

And if you get stuck, seek out the experts who can help you.

“Ask questions to data journalists,” Rogers advised. “They are very friendly, they like to talk about what they do and how they do it.”

Image courtesy of Alice Vergueiro.

Call for Applications: Media Enabling Democracy, Inclusion and Accountability in Moldova

Deadline: 22 August 2017

Internews, through MEDIA-M project, is seeking applications for its “Media Enabling Democracy, Inclusion and Accountability in Moldova” to help media outlets from Republic of Moldova to improve the quality of their content, diversify news formats, strengthen their financial viability, and better engage their audiences, especially digitally.

Six media outlets will be selected for an initial one-year period assistance program, including a differentiated grant opportunity, with the possibility of multi-annual extension based on demonstrated progress and results, as evaluated through annual milestone assessments conducted by Internews staff and consultants as well as ongoing monitoring. Ongoing coaching and mentoring will be provided by long-term editorial and management consultants working regularly with management and staff in-house at each selected outlet to support progress toward individualized targets and goals. The grant amount will be negotiated individually and justified based on the results of a needs assessment. The media outlets selected to receive assistance will be expected to actively participate in MEDIA-M trainings, provide time and space for the editorial and management consultants to work, and design and post/broadcast public service content, including on media literacy issues.

Grants may support production and distribution of multiplatform news content (including technical upgrades to make that possible), introduction of innovative story formats, and coverage of political, economic, and social issues that promote accountability and civic participation.

Priority will be given to outlets based outside the capital and Chisinau-based outlets having/ seeking to establish closer ties with regional audiences, particularly minority-language speakers. At least one of the key partner outlets will focus primarily on production of investigative journalism. At least half of the assisted media outlets will have minority language production.

Eligibility Criteria

In order to be considered eligible to apply, applicants must fulfill the following criteria:

• Be a locally registered organization in Moldova
• Independent editorial policy (as evidenced by external assessment/evaluation reports where possible)
• Proven dedication to professional, ethical journalism (as evidenced by media monitoring reports where possible)
• Romanian and Russian-language outlets and multiple platforms (TV, radio, print, and/or Internet) are eligible.

How to Apply

All interested outlets are encouraged to submit their application electronically via email at the address given on the website with “MEDIA-M KEY PARTNER SUPPORT” in the subject line.

Eligible Country: Moldova

For more information, please visit Call for Applications.