How we kept pace with health data journalism training in South Africa

On March 4^th, journalists from across Africa flew to Cape Town, South Africa for some training on health data reporting. The 20 journalists were from Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Ghana and South Africa. 

I was lucky to be part of the 6 Tanzanian journalists selected to participate in the 17^th edition of World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH) while undergoing intense training on health data reporting at the same time.

It was the first time the conference was taking place on the African continent.

The conference included a workshop on Effective Use of Data in Public Health Reporting organized by Vital Strategies, a US Based Non-Governmental organisation and Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative. At the conference, we were able to access and establish contacts with a good number of experts on health related issues, making us resource rich as journalists hence sparking our imaginations and inspiring our future story plans.

The workshop, which was intended to build the skills of journalists in using data for effective public health reporting, exceeded our expectations in many ways.

“It is more intense than I had thought and very enriching,” said Getrude Mbago, a fellow participant from Tanzania working with Guardian newspaper.

 The workshop was a more practical training on health data reporting enabling journalists to be able to interpret and visualize public health data to make it easily understandable to the readers. And journalists were also taught how to extract a story from data and bring a human aspect to it.

Apart from data, Vital Strategies also saw the need to train African journalists on the effective tactics for interviewing public health experts about data-rich stories. 

It was a very interactive session where everybody had a chance to contribute a point or more.

Our trainers Lara Tabac and Richard Delaney knew exactly how to captivate us through their presentations; group discussions and exercises making us stay alert all the time. Forget about catching a wink or two during their sessions because they knew just exactly how to make you look forward to attending the next session. When the workshop officially closed on 9^th March, we were still yearning for more as this was a valuable learning curve that we wished could go on a little bit longer.

At the end of the conference, we formed a continental association of journalists against tobacco which we will use as a creative springboard to monitor each other’s progress on assignments we are undertaking, honing our skills on reporting harmful effects of tobacco on health and how it affects development of Africa as big tobacco firms now prey on youth from the continent.