Alafarika for Studies and Consultancy organized a training workshop themed: Navigating the African Landscape: Research and Analysis Skills for Local Impact and Global Discourse, specifically designed to equip African researchers, analysts, journalists, and policy enthusiasts with efficient research and analysis skills. The workshop was held virtually via Zoom, on September 6th, 7th, 13th and 14th, 2025. The workshop recorded the attendance of over 40 participants from 12 African countries, including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Morocco, Niger, Ghana, Egypt, Guinea, and Sudan.
The workshop was made free for all participants. Lectures were delivered by two academic experts; Mr. Abubakar Said Saad, an international multimedia professional, and bilingual journalist, and Dr. Olawale Patrick Oni, a senior lecturer at Global Banking School, London. Mr. Saad lectured the participants on September 6th and 7th while Dr. Oni lectured them on September 13th and 14th.
Day I. Understanding Africa: Local Perspectives, Regional Dynamics and Global Intersections
Mr. Saad Abubakar, an international journalist with experience in socioeconomic and environmental issues, discussed understanding Africa from local, regional, and global perspectives. His presentation began with emphasis on the importance of storytelling and narrative power in shaping Africa’s narrative. Delving into the topic of the day, he highlighted how the African continent is often defined by two narrow parameters, emphasizing the need to explore other potential parameters that researchers have yet to discover. He further explained the concept of local perspectives, which involves understanding the specific cultural, socioeconomic, environmental, institutional, and political conditions that shape communities and regions within Africa. He also identified a problem with how “local” is perceived in Africa, equating it with “traditional”, suggesting that local expertise, internal knowledge, and local stories are often undervalued or misunderstood.
Mr Sa’ad further discussed the importance of understanding and utilizing local perspectives in African studies and research. He emphasized the distinction between African locals, who possess deep, firsthand knowledge of their communities, and African experts, who may lack such context. He highlighted the need for balanced representation in research and reporting to achieve narrative equity and empowerment, and also provided examples to illustrate the value of local insights and the consequences of inadequate representation.
Talking about the importance of balanced representation in research and media, Mr. Saad highlighted how certain voices are amplified while others are silenced. He emphasized that comfortable topics are often overrepresented, while uncomfortable or difficult-to-research topics are often ignored. He also spoke about the danger of single stories, colonial legacies in research, and the need to move beyond regurgitating the same narratives. He further encouraged participants to change their search engine results for Africa to see a more diverse representation and to consider the impact of their work on perpetuating stereotypes.
Furthermore, Mr. Sa’ad discussed Africa’s regional dynamics, emphasizing the continent’s interconnectedness through politics, trade, migration, and culture, while highlighting the need for a unified African system to address shared challenges. He explored the limitations of regional blocks like ECOWAS and SADC, the importance of understanding comparative political economies, and the impact of transnational issues such as security, migration, and climate change. He also addressed the factors to consider when researching or reporting for a balanced regional understanding, including media diplomacy, the framing of African innovations, and the reliability of statistics from funded institutions.
Explaining the need to decolonize African research methodologies, Mr. Sa’ad led a discussion on a DNA study in Nigeria that claimed one in four fathers are not biological parents, highlighting concerns about the study’s methodology and sample size. The audience alongside with the lecturer then explored a roadmap for balanced, accurate, and authentic African regional perspectives in research and reporting, emphasizing the importance of decolonial methodologies, ethical representation, and the use of local languages and partnerships with local institutions. They also discussed the need to unify, connect, and link perspectives across African regions rather than focusing on individual countries, and the importance of translating rather than importing data and perspectives from outside the region.
Generally, Mr. Sa’ad’s session delivered a presentation on the importance of developing homemade perspectives on African issues, emphasizing the dangers of relying on external perspectives or “the view from my hotel” approach. He discussed how danger does not always equate to importance and encouraged balanced storytelling. His presentation also covered Africa’s global positioning, knowledge geopolitics, cultural globalization, and the role of the diaspora in research, policymaking, and media framing. He concluded by encouraging participants to approach their studies and reporting on Africa with a “colorless” perspective to achieve a more accurate and balanced narrative of the continent.
Day II. Choosing Research-Worthy Topics, Crafting Insightful Analysis, and Academic Referencing
The session focused on the importance of choosing research topics that connect local African realities with global significance, and the factors that make a research topic worthy, highlighting the balance between personal interest and societal relevance. Mr. Sa’ad discussed the importance of selecting research topics that are both research-worthy and story-worthy, emphasizing the need to consider the time-bound nature, objectivity, planning, innovation, and contemporary relevance of a topic. He highlighted the significance of having a clear “why” for conducting research, which provides motivation and purpose, stressing the importance of planning and having a feasible research plan, as well as ensuring the topic is innovative and interesting to attract attention. He further explained the difference between ideas, topics, and stories in research and storytelling, using examples to illustrate how an idea can be transformed into a research topic or a story.
Evaluating research topic criteria, Mr. Sa’ad discussed the criteria for determining research topic worthiness, emphasizing three perspectives: personal, immediate, and broader. He explained that a topic is more research-worthy if it connects personally to the researcher, relates to their immediate community or profession, or addresses broader academic, societal, or global challenges. He provided examples, including a study on the role of social media in shaping political awareness during protests and research on youth-led protests and democratic participation in Africa.
Citing an example, Mr. Sa’ad shared his personal analysis on why tree planting campaigns fail, which was conducted last year and involved examining 100 campaigns worldwide. He also discussed an analysis on whether Africa should be concerned about earthquakes, based on recent events in Myanmar. He introduced the “Cost of Chocolate” concept as a method to explore topics from multiple perspectives, personal, immediate, and broader. He emphasized the importance of applying this concept to research and analysis to make ideas more relevant and personal.
On AI ethics & strategy, Mr. Sa’ad discussed the concept of AI prompting, explaining it as the process of providing instructions or prompts to AI systems, particularly chatbots, to generate specific information. He emphasized the importance of high-quality prompts, which require specifying roles, tasks, audience, context, and format. He added that ethical AI use, as practiced by reputable organizations, primarily involves prompting rather than content generation, and provided examples and strategies for using AI ethically in research and analysis, stressing the need for clarity and transparency in AI applications. He also presented various AI research and analysis tools, including Gemini, Google Alerts, Wayback Machine, Data Wrapper, Tabula, DeepL Write, and Hemingway Editor, and highlighted the benefits of each tool, such as Gemini’s professional research capabilities, Wayback Machine’s archiving function, and Hemingway Editor’s ability to rephrase complex sentences for clarity.
Talking about journalism, Mr. Sa’ad discussed the importance of conducting insightful analysis in journalism and research, emphasizing the need to go beyond surface facts, frame findings critically, acknowledge uncertainty, and situate findings in broader context. He highlighted the significance of using multiple sources, conducting expert interviews, and responsibly finding and contextualizing data. He also addressed the dangers of relying on heuristic evaluation and general reputation instead of rigorous validation, and stressed the importance of a mix of qualitative expert input and quantitative source triangulation to enhance credibility and interpretive depth.
Day III. Bridging Research Divides: Ethical Artificial intelligence (AI) in African Contexts
The session began with discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in the African context, with participants sharing their definitions and understanding of AI. Dr. Olawale Patrick Oni, the lecturer, provided a comprehensive definition of AI as a replica of human intelligence used to solve complex problems and perform tasks more efficiently than humans. He explained the concept of cognitive offloading, where tasks are delegated to machines to save time and brainpower. The lecture of the day primarily focused on the concept of “bridging research divides,” particularly between the Global North and Africa, highlighting knowledge gaps and disparities in information access and processing. Dr. Oni explained that while closing these gaps may not be feasible with current resources, bridging them is possible through platforms like the current conversation, which transcends time and space.
Talking about the evolution of AI, Dr. Oni provided a historical overview of artificial intelligence (AI), tracing its development from Alan Turing’s 1950 proposal of the Turing test to recent advancements in generative AI and large language models. Key milestones discussed included the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, the creation of the first chatbot in 1966, the development of expert systems and neural networks in the 1970s and 1980s, IBM’s Deep Blue defeating Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997, and recent achievements in image recognition and Go-playing AI. The historical presentation aimed to correct the common misconception that AI is a new field, highlighting its long history and evolution over the decades.
Dr. Oni also discussed the concept of dynamic ethics, emphasizing the need for ethical frameworks to adapt with changing systems. He addressed questions about Ubuntu’s traditional ethics and their potential to achieve cognitive justice in the context of large technology companies’ control over algorithms in South Africa. He highlighted the importance of adopting a global perspective in developing AI, noting that concepts like Ubuntu could provide a framework for creating AI that serves both regional and global markets. He also mentioned challenges with AI’s cultural bias, particularly in generating images of African individuals, and emphasized the need for more culturally inclusive AI development.
The discussion further centered on Nigeria’s position in the global AI landscape, where Dr. Oni explained that while Nigeria is currently on the adoption side rather than the innovation side, the country’s critical sectors like banking and healthcare are heavily dependent on foreign technologies. He emphasized the security implications of this dependence, particularly in the context of cyber warfare and information operations, noting that a sudden withdrawal of foreign support could lead to societal unrest. He also outlined three dimensions of how African countries are approaching AI, including strategy and multi-stakeholder inclusion, human dignity and autonomy, and the need for African scholars and researchers to work on making AI systems reflect local realities and experiences.
While discussing the challenges and implications of developing autonomous technology systems in Africa, particularly in response to global platforms like Twitter/X, Dr. Oni stressed that while African countries could develop their own social media platforms, there would be significant hurdles in convincing users to switch from established Western platforms, citing examples like Donald Trump’s failed social media alternatives. He also talked about gender and cultural diversity in programming, emphasizing the need for more inclusive representation, and discussed the challenges of building AI systems that address colonial legacies and reflect African cultural and religious diversity.
Dr. Oni also discussed algorithmic bias of AI, explaining how AI systems can reflect the biases of their programmers and the data used for training. He stressed that these biases can lead to unfair outcomes, particularly affecting marginalized communities, and cited examples from criminal justice, visa systems, and social media content.
The last point which Dr. Oni discussed was the applications of AI in academic libraries, highlighting its use in information retrieval, chatbots, virtual assistants, collection management, and decision-making. He noted geographical disparities in AI research, with China, the US, and India leading publication output. Dr. Oni emphasized the ethical and practical challenges of AI, including computer vision and the choice between Western (paid) and Chinese (free) AI tools, suggesting Africans might prefer free tools despite potential costs. He also touched on trust values, media narratives, and ethical pathways for AI adoption in Africa, proposing five ethical pillars for African governments. The session concluded with a call for ethical AI development rooted in African contexts, capacity building, and ongoing dialogue between technical and social actors.
Day IV. Data for Research and Storytelling: Effective Strategies for African Analysts
Dr. Olawale Patrick Oni led the session on “Data for Research and Storytelling: Effective Strategies for African Analysts,” emphasizing the importance of compelling narratives grounded in solid data to influence policy, hold institutions accountable, and amplify marginalized voices. Focusing on digital footprints and data collection processes, Dr. Oni explained that every online activity leaves a traceable digital footprint, which can reveal information about a person’s offline identity, including gender and location. He outlined the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) approach to working with data, emphasizing that the type of data to collect is determined by the research problem rather than the researcher’s preferences. He also covered data cleaning and sorting processes, including the removal of outliers and errors to ensure data precision.
Talking about data analysis and presentation, Dr. Oni explained the differences between qualitative and quantitative data, emphasizing that data collection methods determine the type of analysis that follows. He highlighted that while qualitative data uses word-based approaches, quantitative data involves numerical analysis, and both require specific tools and methods. He also discussed various sources for finding relevant data, including national statistical offices, Google’s data resources, and non-governmental organizations, while encouraging participants to explore Google’s data tools and free courses for data journalism.
Dr. Oni further talked on the challenges of collecting data in Africa, particularly from government sources, and the ethical considerations involved in data collection, highlighting the need for researchers to carefully consider their data collection methods and the potential tensions and conflicts that may arise. He also highlighted issues such as fragmented data ecosystems, dishonest data collection, language barriers, and regulatory inconsistencies as challenges of data accessibility and integrity in Africa. He emphasized the importance of sharing research findings through various platforms to increase visibility and suggested solutions like investing in infrastructure, promoting data partnerships, and supporting training in data ethics and storytelling.
The session further emphasized the importance of seeking consent from participants and maintaining data privacy, especially when working with human subjects, and also highlighted the need for African data analysts to align with African data protection frameworks and adopt equity-oriented principles. Additionally, the importance of effective data storytelling was discussed, drawing on African oral traditions and participatory methods to create compelling narratives. The session concluded with a review of data visualization tools and practical steps for conducting research, including defining questions, locating data, evaluating quality and ethics, analyzing data, and creating and sharing compelling stories.
Conclusion
The workshop was indeed an interactive one, as all its sessions ended with questions from the participants, and answers by the lecturers. Group pictures were also taken to end each session, and the presentations of the lecturers were sent to all participants in pdf format after the workshop ended. Few weeks after, all participants received their certificate of participation via their emails. The workshop was successfully carried out, and the participants highly expressed their satisfaction through their positive reviews about the workshop.
Dawood Abubakri from Nigeria in his review said: “I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to attend this session. The program was insightful and enriching, providing valuable perspectives on African research challenges. A deep appreciation to the organisers – Alafarika.”
Moussa Doumbouya from Guinea commented: “Thank you so much for organizing such an insightful workshop. It was a pleasure to be part of it. I truly appreciate the effort put into making it valuable for all participants. I look forward to future engagements with Alafarika.”
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