Round 1

ANIC is looking for ideas that will transform the way that African media work. This means that your idea should offer significant and tangible improvements to existing tools or techniques, or should propose new ways for African journalists to gather news, tell stories, engage with audiences, or sustain media organisations.

Ideas that have the potential to be replicated or that could scale continentally will have an advantage.

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African Lens - An African Centric Photojournalism Magazine

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African Lens - An African Centric Photojournalism Magazine

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1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Develop an online portal (mobile & desktop) to document life in Africa through powerful visual storytelling essays / editorials.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

African Lens will provide a sustainable business for photojournalism works in Africa. This doesn’t exist today - i.e a model to fund and develop important stories that need to be told. 

3. Describe the real world challenge that you are trying to solve for African media [50 words]

In the photojournalism space in Africa, there are 2 main challenges :

  1. A sustainable business model to drive the development of photojournalism stories, and
  2. A platform with a wide audience reach which allows us to tell our own stories ( from our perspective) and engage.

4. How and why will your solution work? [100 words]

  To create a commercially viable model, we are looking to do 3 things:

  1. Create an online platform ( mobile & desktop) which allows us to generate digital ad revenue against our content,
  2. Develop content syndication / distribution partnerships with major outlets ( e.g Flipboard)
  3. Find ways to monetize our work ( licensing  fees, exhibitions, books e.t.c )

Access to the content itself will be free across all our platforms. We intend to deeply integrate social media tools to drive engagement. Creating a truly social environment around our stories, to engage about issues impacting our lives, will drive audience interest, participation and engagement. 

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

African Lens  is currently run by Victor Acquah.  It began over 2 years ago as an online portal to showcase interesting stories from Africa though free user submissions.  Free quality user stories from Africa are very hard to come by. This funding will allow us to do the following:

  1. Transition African Lens from a non commercial product to a commercially viable and vibrant platform.
  2. Hire developers to build  a new iOS Magazine app.
  3. Re-design the current website to make it easier to engage socially. 
  4. Hire an editor to manage content development.
Please visit us at http://www.africanlens.com / Twitter: @africanlens

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

The website for African Lens has been active for the past 2 years ( http://www.africanlens.com) with a pretty vibrant community in the online social space. However, it needs a refresh to make it more social friendly and more importantly, an iOS app to give us a better monetization platform and reach.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

By making it commercially viable at the beginning i.e pursuing digital ad opportunities on the platform, content syndication partnerships and several other avenues depending on the type of content provided by the story. e.g  collaborative exhibitions with major museums.

Requested amount from ANIC: $100K
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 1.5 YRS 
Total Project Cost: $150K ( I am building in an extra $50K as the seed money to fund story development. It is also very likely the development of the iOS app will cost more  depending on development time frame and resources needed. However we intend to create a plan to develop in stages - web portal + story development + syndication partnerships, then IOS app from our initial revenue streams. )

Name: Victor Acquah
Twitter: @africanlens
Organization: African Lens
Country: USA / Ghana

People Who Liked This Post

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    Please provide feedback - what do you think ? Will it work?
  4. Victor Acquah submitted this to africannewschallenge

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