I have been a product of many different fellowships. I will speak first about the Christian fellowships I have been part of, most of them out of compulsion rather than choice. At my family church when I was nine, on the street I grew up in, and in high school. But also about the fellowships I have chosen, the Media Challenge Fellowship, the One World Media Fellowship, and the LEDE fellowship.
All of these fellowships have made a distinct difference in my career as a journalist. The Media Challenge Fellowship for instance threw me right into the field as a student of journalism. I, who was just learning about the basics of journalism and reporting; how to find the angle for a story, the five W’s and H, how to write a headline – was being forced to tell ‘real’ stories.
Holding my hands in this case as well was a mentor, Carol Ariba, who remains a mentor till this day but who sat me down and taught me about the need to design the journalism career and future that I wanted for myself.
It also gave me Abaas Mpindi, who I remain always very fortunate to have, in ways that I can barely compress into this blog post. But a summary would just be that Abaas was the first person I told about Minority Africa.
With the One World Media fellowship, I got my first ever reporting grant to film my first documentary on how a mental health institution in Uganda was using dance classes to fight discrimination. I also got an incredible mentor like in the Media Challenge Fellowship, this time; Zoe Flood who has mentored me in the production of that documentary but also in life. Zoe has listened to all the tales of Minority Africa, to our good and bad days and to our failures and successes.
Similarly, the LEDE fellowship gave me a community. For the first time, I was in a cohort with people who weren’t just journalists but also media founders. I cannot tell you what that did for Minority Africa, I can truly only show you and all of this is the result. LEDE, through the Solutions Journalism Network also gave us our very first seed grant for Minority Africa, without which I doubt any of this would have been possible.
I remember very clearly that we were both walking to our Ubers and we just said something along the lines of not being able to wait to start a fellowship.
I have spent this much time talking about all of these fellowships because they are groups, experiences, and people that I hold very dearly, they shaped not just my reporting career but also how I generally interact with and perceive the media ecosystem. But they also shaped me as a person.
Thinking through this, it was nearly inevitable when I began Minority Africa that I immediately thought of a fellowship program. I wasn’t sure, to be honest, about what this would look like but I knew that I wanted people to experience what I had in all of my fellowships and particularly people from marginalized communities.
In 2021, that vision started to flesh out a bit more when Patricia Kisesi, our current Duty Editor, who like me has been a product of fellowships, decided to join our team. We talked one day about the fellowship as we alighted the stairs at the media hub where we are residents in Uganda. I remember very clearly that we were both walking to our Ubers and we just said something along the lines of not being able to wait to start a fellowship.
We forgot about it for two reasons; one the organization didn’t have the money to fund one, but also Minority Africa was just beginning its year as innovators in residence with Aga Khan University and DW Akademie so we had immediate milestones to meet and so conceptualizing new milestones without having met these ones seemed a bit far off.
This was early in 2021. Probably March or April. It was in August or September that we revisited the conversation again, this time as we were applying for newer grants. It became clear to us why it had to happen and what it had to look like. We spoke with the growth team about this and pitched it at executive level, no one (they too products of many fellowships) seemed to think it was a bad idea.
So then we prayed for the money to be able to do it and then it came. This is a very simplistic summary of what has been at least a seven month process. But I rush it truly to get to the bane of this post which is the fact that, there is a need for another fellowship, especially one that platforms the voices of groups and persons willfully ignored and deliberately silenced.
It is my and truthfully our honest hope that the Minority Africa Fellowship can reflect some if not all of the many incredible fellowships we have been through as a team. But it is our even biggest hope that it can become its own thing, feeding from all of these experiences but its own unique thing that will culminate in the creation and sustenance of a more equitable media and a more inclusive Africa
