West Africa build gathers pace for The Conversation Africa

Wale Fatade and Ogechi Ekeanyanwu are both experienced journalists who will be sourcing articles written by Nigerian academics in the country as well as the diaspora. They will be joined in January by Adejuwon Soyinka, who will be Regional Editor West Africa. The team will be supplemented by Joey Akan, who will be working for us part time for the Arts and Culture section.

These new team members will add strength to our West African team – Godfred Boafo in Accra and Aliou Niane in Dakar.

Building the West Africa team is a major milestone for The Conversation Africa. The small start-up team of eight in Johannesburg in 2015 has grown to 19. Of these 13 are based in Johannesburg, four in Nairobi, our colleagues in Accra and Dakar and a colleague working out of London. As the team has expanded, so has the profile of our coverage to reflect a much richer pan-African offering.

We couldn’t have done this without our partners in the university sector, particularly the academics who have generously written for us and the institutions that have given us support. Over 3,100 authors have written for us from 644 institutions since we launched. We have published over 4,780 articles – which shows that many academics have come back to write for us again.

In addition to the 15 institutions that provide us with financial support, we are able to run our operations rent free because of the generosity of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the African Population Health and Research Centre in Nairobi and the Nigerian Academy of Science in Lagos.

And of course we also rely on our readers and the media outlets that republish our articles under creative commons. Thank you for your support. We will endeavour to deliver great copy from as wide an African brief as possible every day.

The Conversation is funded by the National Research Foundation, eight universities, including the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Rhodes University, Stellenbosch University and the Universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal, Pretoria, and South Africa. It is hosted by the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Western Cape, the African Population and Health Research Centre and the Nigerian Academy of Science. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a Strategic Partner