Code for Africa (CfA) is looking for a programme manager to help coordinate its multimedia journalism team. This diverse team consists of pioneering journalists who produce multimedia projects on health and development across the continent, often based on data-driven research and statistics, working alongside visualisers who create the interactive and static charts and maps that illustrate our storytelling and developers who create data-driven interactive content

The ideal candidate is a fantastic task manager with a strong design aesthetic and familiarity with admin and operations. Your primary responsibility would be to ensure the team meets its milestones and deadlines. You will also be a creative problem solver, remove blockers while checking that project quality meets partner expectations.

You will also work with the team to select and organise multimedia content (including photos and videos), double-check static charts, maps, interactives and satellite visualisations. And, you would use your critical eye to help the team polish and improve their outputs.

Our team uses tools like Slack, Trello and Google Drive to manage our work, and Infogram, Atlas, Carto, Adobe Illustrator, QGis, Shorthand, OpenRefine, D3JS and others to package the storytelling.

Some familiarity with all of these tools would be helpful, but the main requirement is knowing how to manage complex, multidisciplinary projects. We value clarity, precision and concision in our teams and are looking for someone who has strong diplomatic skills.

The successful candidate will report to the Pan-African Data Editor of Code for Africa.

The candidate will have a strong portfolio and/or references.

Key Responsibilities

• In consultation with the content director, you will help articulate and implement CfA’s strategic vision, storytelling aesthetics and audience engagement philosophy as part of the organisation’s short- and long-term priorities.
• You will coordinate a diverse distributed team of data wranglers, designers and multimedia journalists to ensure they function as a efficient unit to create interactive dataviz and multimedia microsites. This will include:
• Setting project milestones and timelines, and helping ensure the team meets agreed deadlines.
• Running daily standup sessions with the full team to help set priorities and deliverables, and proactively solve problems.
• Schedule and facilitate regular design reviews and stakeholder meetings, to obtain user feedback to help shape projects.
• Empower the team and CfA partners to do their best work by removing daily blockers and helping them get answers to questions.
• You will work with CfA’s pan-African production manager, to coordinate the multimedia team’s production timelines and resources to enable development sprints on projects. This will include:
• Synchronising the multimedia team’s project timelines and output with those of the technology and engagement teams, to sure that projects meet deadlines and quality standards.
• Liaising with CfA’s Secretariat on to ensure smooth implementation of contracts, budgets and bureaucracy related to the programme.
• You will coordinate with external newsroom partners, subcontracted contributors and other stakeholders across the continent. This will include:
• Serving as a liaison between the CfA content team and external stakeholders on projects.
• Proactive and clear communication is key. You will maintain effective communication methods within and outside of the team, and will serve as the team’s bridge to CfA’s content director, as well as other CfA managers and teams.
• Lateral thinking and proactive problem-solving are core to CfA’s culture. You will proactively find ways to make existing processes more efficient and suggest practical ways to strengthen systems.

About CfA

CfA is registered as an NPO in South Africa and serves as coordinator for the continent’s largest federation of civic technology laboratories that help the media, civil society organisations, and governments digitise information and build tools to inform and empower citizens. CfA currently has active projects in 24 African countries, with affiliate labs, of varying size, capacity and maturity in: Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

CfA’s fiscal agent, based in the U.S.A, is the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). CfA is supported by donors that include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google NewsLab, Google Jigsaw, the Knight Foundation, Omidyar Networks, Open Society Foundations, the World Bank and a number of smaller philanthropies.