The annual AIJC is a FAIR-Wits partnership.
As the only international organization uniting African IJ’s and struggling to achieve their aspiration to ‘dig deeper and aim higher’, FAIR reaches out to all journalists who aim to carry out best journalism practice in Africa. The FAIR network encourages, inspires and helps to enable African professional journalists, who are passionate about their work and feel that they want to serve a democratic purpose in unearthing social ills, wrongs and injustices, to do so. FAIR unites all journalists who are committed to better journalism output in Africa.
Nowhere are this commitment and inspiration more tangible than at FAIR’s pan-African IJ Conference, established precisely for this purpose. Internationally, the Summit places African best practice in journalism visibly on the global agenda, as it feeds into the yearly Global IJ Conference. The GIJC is organized by the Global IJ Network, of which FAIR is a founder member.
The FAIR African IJ Conference provides:
- Exposure of newcomers to the FAIR network
- A ‘pull to unite’ to all journalists committed to best practice in journalism Resolving ways forward on challenges
- Adopting ‘best practice’ and ethics guidelines
- Reporting on cross border cooperative investigations and options to start new ones
- Presentations of ‘role model’ stories and case studies
- Exposure of members to sympathetic media houses and IJ supporting institutions, in order to achieve publication, in Africa itself, of quality stories/programmes which are under threat of being spiked.
- Access to training provided by the event partner (in 2007 and 2008,the Investigative Journalism Workshop of the University of the Witwatersrand).
2010 report: From its opening session with American journalist Joshua Prager to its last, a live video-link interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assage, the 2010 African Investigative Journalism Conference was packed with ideas and debate. Click here to view the AIJC 2010 report (pdf).
2009 report: In 2009, for the first time, FAIR and its partner, the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, merged their two conference events to create ‘Power Reporting: the African Investigative Journalism Conference’. The resulting event showcased the best in that years’ African investigative journalism, from Sorious Samura’s ‘Addicted to Aid’ and Olukayode Thomas’ ‘It’s not just about who scored the goal’. To read the full AIJC 2009 report, click here
