Trainers

Heinrich Böhmke

Heinrich Böhmke is an experienced trainer and director at the Specialised Skills Institute of SA. He is also an investigator and litigator with experience in prosecuting public and private sector corruption and sexual misconduct matters among other investigations in South Africa. In 2013, Bohmke adapted the courtroom method of interrogating narratives and witnesses for investigative journalists and editors.The courses has been presented multiple times across Africa including South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda as well as Senegal and Ghana.

Rex Merrifield

Rex Merrifield is a journalist and media consultant with more than two decades of experience in news, as a correspondent, editor and trainer. He has covered political and general news, economics, corporate and financial news, and energy markets. His 17 years at Reuters included general and political cover as a correspondent in South Africa during the transition to democracy, assignments in Central and East Africa, and senior posts in London, Helsinki and Brussels. His business reporting and editing roles have included covering some of the world’s biggest resource groups, among them Anglo American, De Beers, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto. Rex has also worked in radio news and has written for the web and for corporate publications. Among his clients as an independent consultant have been the African Development Bank, the European Commission and the Crisis Management Initiative of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Martti Ahtisaari.

Alexander Yearsley

Alex Yearsley is the founder and Director of Stanley Global Services, a bespoke business intelligence and political risk consultancy which focus on Africa, the Middle East, Far East and the FSU. Prior to the establishment of SGS, he was a Director of Proven, part of the Good Governance Group – G3 , where he was responsible for litigation support, asset tracing and business intelligence investigations for a wide variety of corporate, governmental and private clients. From 1997 to 2009 he worked at Global Witness, a UK based investigative human rights nongovernmental organisation responsible for international campaigns on corporate and governmental corruption centered on the trade in and exploitation of natural resources. At Global Witness he built up an extensive network in the NGO world but also in global media outlets, academics, governments, law enforcement and relevant security agencies. He has extensive investigative field experience across west, southern and central Africa and South East Asia. He has also worked in the Middle East and has built up an excellent source network in the middle and Far East and FSU. Having spent over a decade in the civil society movement he has an excellent understanding of the motivations and issues that drive and fund the activist side of the academic world and also the campaigning nongovernmental community.

Khadija Sharife

Khadija Sharife is an African investigative researcher and writer. She helps coordinate the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), Investigative Dashboard (Africa), and the EU-funded Environmental Trade and Liability (EJOLT). She is a fellow to the World Policy Institute and contributor to the Tax Justice Network (Africa). She has published in a number of academic and mainstream media including Africa Confidential and the World Policy Journal. During the past year, she has helped uncover billions of dollars in mispriced minerals from African countries including South Africa, Angola, Zimbabwe among others. Her specialisation is financial opacity, political ecology and corruption. She is based in South Africa.

Friedrich Lindenberg

Friedrich Lindenberg is a news technologist with Code for Africa. He is also a coder and data journalist interested in how web technology can be utilised to create new narrative and investigative techniques. He was a 2013 Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow at Spiegel Online. Previously, he contributed to various projects at the Open Knowledge Foundation, including OpenSpending, a platform that helps citizens across the world keep track of government finance.

With Support From:

Justin Arenstein

He is an award-winning investigative journalist and digital strategist currently helping Google and the African Media Initiative strengthen Africa’s watchdog media by working with newsrooms to implement better forensic research and evidence-based reportage. This includes helping media adopt digital tools and data journalism strategies. Justin manages the $1m African News Innovation Challenge, is rolling out HacksHackers chapters across Africa, and supports newsroom-based experiments with citizen reporting, mobile news, and augmented reality platforms. Justin is a former Press Councillor in South Africa, and continues to serve on several media industry bodies and think tanks. His investigative reportage has helped put a senator, two legislature speakers and a provincial cabinet minister behind bars, and contributed to the ouster of two provincial premiers and several other cabinet ministers and state officials on charges ranging from child rape to corruption.