Starting from scratch is daunting. And exhilarating. Your heart pounds, you can taste adrenaline, the sense of urgency and anticipation makes you high. I can recall each of these sensations 10 years after the thrilling moment when The Conversation Africa went live, and our first newsletter was sent out. Thanks to some nifty software, we were able to watch readers open their emails in real time in cities and towns in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Malawi, Zimbabwe as well as beyond in the US, the UK, India, France, Japan and Australia.
We’d gone live. People were reading us. We’d launched and there was no going back.
It was a tiny team that celebrated the moment: nine of us in an office in Johannesburg plus two colleagues from TC Australia who’d flown over to show us the ropes. Our promise when we launched was that we would “work with academics across Africa and internationally to bring informed expertise to a global audience”.
It’s a promise we’ve kept. From a small team in an office in Johannesburg we’ve gone on to open offices in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal. We’ve published 11,775 articles about African research, written by 7,540 academics, attracting over 180 million reads, helped by 935 republishers.
It’s a model that works because of the generosity of donors, universities, academics and readers. And because we offer evidence-based insight you can trust.
In retrospect the whole idea might have seemed mad. The impact of the 2008 financial crisis was still being felt. Nobody was in an expansive mood: governments were cutting budgets, economic growth was slow. At the time the media landscape was in bad shape as more titles hit the wall and those that elected to keep going were shrinking their operations.
What tipped the balance to go for it was that The Conversation offered the opportunity of building – at scale – a partnership between academics and journalists anchored on the simple premise that researchers would be the writers, and the journalists would be the editors.
The second factor was that the prototype had been built and was working extremely well. Four years prior to our launch The Conversation Australia (the mothership) had gone live. This was followed by editions in the UK, then in the US.
All three were incredibly successful. It was clear to me that tapping into the vast world of academic research as the primary source of articles, and coupling this with the skills of journalists trained as editors, was a winning formula. Academics were keen to write (without being paid), there were journalists eager to apply their editing skills, and media outlets were hungry to pick up articles put out under a Creative Commons licence.
The “why” all made sense. The “how” proved to be trickier.
Money was a problem. The university sectors in other regions were the mainstay of the earlier editions. But universities on the continent were cash-strapped and hardly in a position to bankroll our endeavour. The answer was two-fold: find donors that were supporting the higher education sector in the hope that they would see the merits of the project; and secondly, ask universities for support, either in the form of money or by offering us rent-free accommodation.
Both strategies worked. We raised enough cash to pay for the small team based in rent-free offices at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The second tricky bit was fulfilling the promise of being The Conversation Africa. An office in Johannesburg wasn’t going to cut it. We set about finding more money so that we could expand our footprint. By 2017 our team could boast a colleague in Kenya working from an office gifted by the African Population and Health Research Centre. It took another two years to fulfil the promise with colleagues in Lagos (in an office at the Nigerian Academy of Sciences) and a colleague in Accra. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place with the launch of TC Afrique in 2023 with a team of two in Dakar.
I put The Conversation Africa’s success down to generosity. The generosity of spirit of my colleagues. The generosity of donors. The generosity of universities. The generosity of academics who have volunteered to share their knowledge and approached the rigours of our editing with grace and forbearance. And finally the generosity of you, our readers, who express your appreciation in a host of different ways, not least by sharing articles you come across far and wide. Thank you.
It’s been a remarkable and hugely fulfilling 10 years. The Conversation Africa has established itself as the source of articles you can trust. A rare commodity in these tricky times. Please continue to support us. We need you in our corner.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
