The much-awaited Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2020 report is finally out and the picture is not all that rosy for gender equality in the media. There are specks of hope, but the landscape remains largely unchanged especially in Africa. The study, which is done every five years, shows notable reversals on some fronts in what has previously been a slow but steady progress towards equality; for instance, the number of women in newsrooms declined from 35% to 32% in the last five years.

Another notable change was how the study, which depends on thousands of volunteers, was done. In April 2020, when the research was officially slated to begin, the Covid-19 pandemic had taken hold. Governments imposed lockdowns and physical meetups were out of question. This meant the media monitoring could not go ahead as planned and had to be moved to September.

Code for Africa (CfA), the report’s technical partner, put together a team of software engineers, data analysts and product owners to create the GMMP 2020 platform to collect data and do the analyses.

“The robustness of the platform gave us a relatively smooth analysis process for a project of this scale thanks to the very innovative adaptations made by the tech team,” said Jean Githae, Data Analyst at CfA.

Given the different skill sets and the fact that members work remotely, the first task was to dockerise the platform which made it easy for all developers to add their contributions. It meant changes could be deployed quickly and allow for feedback from the team. On top of that, we took advantage of our weekly meeting to demonstrate our progress for that week.

We then added containerisation which greatly improved our developer experience and easy deployment of the system.

The initial GMMP platform was programmed in Python2.7 and Django 1.7 and CfA had to upgrade the whole system to Python3 and Django 2.2.

One of the most compelling reasons for the upgrade was that support for Python2 stopped in January 2020. The new features in Django also helped us write cleaner code and fix security bugs in the previous versions.

We also implemented frontend changes including GenMap integration using JavaScript.

Telling stories with visualisations

Since visualisations tell better stories, we decided to add a way to illustrate the GMMP reports using Wazimap, which CfA had previously funded to build. In addition to hosting this Wazimap instance, we created custom shapefiles for the regions from where GMMP data had been collected.

We then created a Python script that extracted datasets from the GMMP report and converted them into the Wazimap data format.

The final bit of the integration was to customise the Wazimap frontend code to work with our newly deployed Wazimap instance. Finally, we customised the frontend to match the GMMP report theme.

How we made our coding sheets accessible

While the data capture has traditionally been done offline, the new platform presented a challenge as different teams have varied resource capabilities and contexts.

To facilitate the virtual monitoring, CfA developed a spreadsheet, which could be downloaded before the monitoring date.

We extracted data from excel sheets and added them to the database using data manipulation libraries such as Pandas. This saved teams from having to manually enter data into the platform.

In addition, CfA developed an API which would upload the responses from the coding sheets to the platform.

Training teams

Leading up to the monitoring day, training sessions were organised for the different regions. The CfA tech team shared video tutorials, which gave a step-by-step guide on the platform features, and trained coordinators from Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia Pacific on how the platform works.

Our most memorable lessons weren’t technical

While there are many technical lessons the team learned from building and managing this kind of software platform, surprisingly, the most memorable ones turned out to be non-technical.

It’s a team game: By creating a small but self-managed team consisting of a product owner, a data analyst and software engineers, the development of the GMMP platform was smoother than expected. The team was in constant communication over Slack, had weekly meetings where new features were demonstrated and feedback given, and together, next steps were decided and prioritised.

Real user testing is priceless: While the implementation team did their best to anticipate what users behaviour would be like, the actual feedback received from users still managed to surprise. This included features they enjoyed and the ones they didn’t quite like. The final version of the platform used on the monitoring date would have been quite different if it weren’t for the feedback received during real user testing and training.

Support is everything: By making sure the platform supports multiple languages and training material (guides and videos) were readily available, many more participants were eager to use the platform, compared to 2015.

We also made sure the implementation team were generally available over Slack, email or even WhatsApp to address any issues from participants across multiple time zones.

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), a global NGO that promotes communication rights for social justice. The GMMP is a collaborative effort of various women’s rights organisations, grassroots groups, media associations, faith-based/interfaith organisations, university students and researchers around the world. UN Women, the lead United Nations entity on gender equality, has supported GMMP thrice consecutively since 2010.

Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 21 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions, and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative and the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network.

CfA also manages the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the best possible forensic data tools, digital security and whistleblower encryption to help improve their ability to tackle crooked politicians, organised crime and predatory big business. CfA also runs one of Africa’s largest skills development initiatives for digital journalists, and seed funds cross-border collaboration.