The grant process for both awards was highly competitive, with hundreds of applicants competing from all over Africa. In both cases, the selection was made by independent international juries.

The first award is from impactAFRICA, where we are one of 12 winners for our proposal:  “The Scale of Rape in South Africa: Documenting the scale of rape through self-collected data and campaigning journalism to motivate for specific policy changes across clinics and police stations in South Africa”.

This is the only project to have been chosen from South Africa.

Winners will each receive a cash grant as well as support from Code for Africa’s technology and data journalism laboratories across the continent. The African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) will also help winners to syndicate the resulting digital stories into a range of leading African and wider world media.

Secondly, we have been chosen by innovateAFRICA as one of 22 projects selected out 736 applicants from 49 countries for our proposal: Hospital Helper. We aim to create South Africa’s first geo-data tools and journalism for checking the safety and health rating of local hospitals and clinics, based on official government audits and inspections from the Office of Health Standards Compliance and other bodies.

“We’ve selected some of the brightest innovators in this space to experiment with leapfrog technologies, but the real focus is to help teams build real-world solutions to real-world problems that can immediately be adopted and scaled by mainstream media companies and civil society,” explains innovateAFRICA founder, Justin Arenstein.

Health-e is doing our best to innovate at a very difficult time globally for journalism and non-profit organisations. Thank you for your ongoing support.