Submissions open for GovSpend Media Fellowship 2023 – Nigeria

The gov spend portal makes it easy for users to see full spending details and access the required information to investigate value for money.

This year for three months- September to November, the selected 12 fellows would be supported to identify spending from the gov spend platform, investigate it, and establish value for money or corruption cases that may have occurred during the procurement process. The 12 investigative stories developed from the media fellowship will be published via the medium by which the fellows work on.

Benefits

• They will provide a monthly stipend of N200,000 to cover story coverage and logistics. They will also hold rounds of engagements with stakeholders on the ideas to receive feedback and potential support.
• Other sessions on Centring People in your stories, Storytelling for journalists, making sense of the data, Data Visualisation Tools, and Multimedia storytelling will be handled by the BudgIT team.
• BudgIT does not guarantee the publishing of stories in the Nigerian dailies as applicants are ideally full-time writers, print, radio or broadcast journalists, filmmakers, bloggers, or other media makers, with well-established records of publication, dissemination or broadcast in local, regional or national markets, or among targeted audiences or constituencies.

Project Activities

• Activity 1: Launch and Select Media Fellows to Strengthen Fight against Corruption through the GovSpend Platform BudgIT
  • BudgIT will launch the Govspend fellowship program for application in the third week of June and select the 12 fellows to be brought on board the program. The selection process would be deliberate in picking candidates from the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria and ensuring gender balance and inclusion in the selection.
• Activity 2: Review and update the Govspend Portal
  • BudgIT will engage consultants to review and update the govspend portal to ensure that it is up to date with the available information on the open treasury platform for use by the media fellow during this program.
• Activity 3: Training Sessions for the GovSpend Media Fellows
  • There will be a focused training session, a total of 4 sessions, with the govspend media fellows. The sessions would be facilitated by experts on different thematic topics that would enhance the capacity of the fellows to develop investigative stories. The session will include training on using the govspend portal, creative communication, data analysis and data-driven stories.
• Activity 4: Media Investigative Story Development
  • The media fellows would be supported with N200,000 to aid their investigative story development.

Evaluation

• The project will be monitored based on the metrics they have set to achieve with the project.
  • First, they will measure the number of fellows trained and their spread to establish if they achieved inclusion, region, and gender balance.
  • They will also count on achieving the 4 training sessions planned for this project and 12 data-driven stories using the GovSpend portal.
  • They will also measure the feedback of the fellow on how the program is helpful or otherwise to their career, and they will track the citizens’ impressions on the stories that the fellows would publish.

For more information, visit BudgIT Foundation.