Press freedom and democracy in Africa and around the world

[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. The World Press Freedom Index, which is issued by Reporters Without Borders, measures the health of press freedom around the world.

The index reflects things like the economic health of the press, their legal protections, and even the physical safety of journalists. And in Twenty Twenty-Five, the global average score was the lowest it's ever been.

On this episode, we're going to explore the challenges facing journalists and the press through the lens of press figures, who are working in a part of the world, where press freedom is, at times, a matter of life and death. This spring, the Watson Institute's Africa Initiative hosted a conference exploring the relationship between the media and democracy in countries across Africa.

Experts from across the continent and the world compared their stories and analyzes, and explored what these challenges can teach us about press freedom around the world today. On this episode, you're going to hear from some of the journalists and media experts who attended. Later on, you'll hear a discussion with Sadibou Marong, a journalist and the Sub-Saharan Africa Bureau Chief for Reporters Without Borders based in Senegal, Zubaida Ismail, a freelance journalist and Ghana's correspondent for Reporters Without Borders, and Chernoh Bah, a post-doctoral research associate at the Watson Institute.

Chernoh was one of the key organizers of this spring's conference. And before we get to the bigger conversation, let's hear a little bit of his story. His career and life illustrate the threats to a free press that we are seeing around the world today, as well as the importance of the work of journalists.

Chernoh Bah grew up in Sierra Leone during a pivotal chapter in the country's history, a decade long Civil War, fueled by the illegal trade of what became known as blood diamonds.

CHERNOH BAH: We are all spectators. And if you like, victims of that 10-year Civil War. So it conditioned how we came to see ourselves and our role in society.

DAN RICHARDS: The war reshaped the entire country. Tens of thousands of people died in the conflict, and millions were displaced. For Chernoh, it also meant that his formal education was cut short.

CHERNOH BAH: I was looking forward to go to college, but was unable to do that because of the instability in the country, and the social upheaval, and all of that.

DAN RICHARDS: While college was out of reach, another interest of Chernoh's, media and journalism, was not.

CHERNOH BAH: Media was part of that engagement to advocate for peaceful society, a civil environment where people can live in freely and realize the purposes of existence.

DAN RICHARDS: He started to freelance for a local paper, and his first big break came when he witnessed a dramatic event in his neighborhood. A local preacher was accused of misappropriating relief supplies. Angry neighbors gathered at the preacher's house, and he fled out the back door.

Chernoh wrote up an account of the event.

CHERNOH BAH: And I took it to a newspaper editor and handed it to him. And he read it. He said, yeah, I think it's a good story. So he published it. He said, come tomorrow to the office.

In the morning, I picked up the newspaper, and it was on the front page of the newspaper. I was very much thrilled by it. I was impressed. Oh, yeah. Then I realized, OK, I can write. So he encouraged me to start writing. That's the beginning of my media journey.

DAN RICHARDS: Chernoh was drawn to reporting on stories that uncovered corruption and abuse by those in power.

CHERNOH BAH: So throughout my life, as a journalist, has been one that is designed to highlight human rights abuses, corruption, the kind of stories that will generate the required conversation around good governance and accountability.

DAN RICHARDS: Chernoh became a leading investigative journalist in Sierra Leone. In the Twenty Tens, he helped uncover government abuse that was occurring amidst the region's Ebola outbreak.

CHERNOH BAH: And it highlighted the mismanagement of epidemic funds and even published a book on the outbreak, largely evaluating both the national and international response to the outbreak.

DAN RICHARDS: His reporting made waves in both Sierra Leone and internationally.

CHERNOH BAH: This was even covered by The New York Times.

DAN RICHARDS: And it became the focus of ire from the leaders and allies of the country's ruling party, the All People's Congress.

CHERNOH BAH: The threats against me had started since then.

DAN RICHARDS: In Twenty Sixteen, facing continued threats and harassment from those in power, he left the country. Two years later, there was an election in Sierra Leone, and the main opposition party, the Sierra Leone People's Party, used Chernoh's work to highlight the corruption of those in power. The candidate representing the Sierra Leone People's Party won the presidency.

CHERNOH BAH: The work that I did in the previous 10 years before they came to power was instrumental in their campaigns. They used my publications, republished my publications. My book became part of the conversation that led to the defeat of that government and the success of this current regime.

DAN RICHARDS: But then Chernoh did what any real investigative reporter would do. He stayed on his beat, and he turned his attention to the new party in power.

CHERNOH BAH: And once they were in office, I decided to hold them to account based on those electoral promises. You promised to fight corruption, but look at the corruption. You promised to address wage disparities, and you haven't done this.

DAN RICHARDS: Soon, Chernoh was writing stories uncovering corruption on the very people who had used his previous stories on corruption to gain power. Many of these stories were damning.

CHERNOH BAH: Exposing high profile corruption, involving the loot of public funds by the current government of Sierra Leone. And it involves the president, the wife of the president, leading officials in the administration. Our investigation led to the publication of over 120 reports, now 20 articles covering the entire government, from the president's office to almost every ministry, agency, and department.

DAN RICHARDS: At this time, Chernoh was still living abroad, but that didn't stop him from once again becoming a target of Sierra Leone's ruling elite.

CHERNOH BAH: They decided to launch their own aggressive campaign against me, and it took various levels of harassment of various kinds, passing legislations and laws to criminalize the publication of this public interest information. Paying people to stage violence in Sierra Leone so they could associate that violence with my publications, to say that my publications were an incitement to violence.

DAN RICHARDS: And they weren't just attacks in the media or in the courts. There were increasingly threats of physical violence.

CHERNOH BAH: They would send me text messages, phone calls, online and offline campaigns, death threats.

DAN RICHARDS: Having become the focus of harassment and threats from both of Sierra Leone's leading political parties, Chernoh doesn't anticipate feeling safe returning to Sierra Leone anytime soon.

CHERNOH BAH: Both parties find it impossible now to exploit my work to serve their agenda. So they find unity in waging a concerted campaign against my work. That's the place where we are. It took 20 years to get to that, from Two Thousand and Two to now.

DAN RICHARDS: Chernoh's story is remarkable, but the harassment, threats, and intimidation he has faced as an investigative journalist are hardly unique. While working as an investigative reporter and living in exile in the United States, Chernoh resumed his formal education.

He received his PhD in history from Northwestern in Twenty Twenty-Three. And in Twenty Twenty-Four, he became a postdoctoral research associate at the Watson Institute. These days, Chernoh is especially interested in connecting his personal and professional experiences to broader issues around press freedom and Democratic health.

This year, working with Watson's Africa Initiative, he helped to organize the Media and Democracy in Africa Conference. It was a space for journalists and thinkers like him to explore the role the media plays in the development and strengthening of democracy. The conference, as the title suggests, focused on countries in Africa specifically. But the ideas and issues they explored went far beyond the continent's borders.

CHERNOH BAH: So the conference, in some ways, is to show that some of us in Africa who are here now have been going through these questions. We've lived under dictatorships of all kinds, from military regimes to badly elected authoritarian regimes, kleptocrats in Africa. And they've made it a priority to wage a war against free speech, and academic freedom, and press freedom.

So we just want to have a conversation. I'm hoping that we can have a conversation that will offer us some kind of understanding of these issues beyond the small places that we tend to find ourselves, that we are faced with a global crisis of democracy, but it's not a new crisis. Also, it's one that has been ongoing and more intense in other parts of the world, and perhaps it's now a global concern.

DAN RICHARDS: During the conference, which took place at the Watson Institute in April, I gathered some of the guests to hopefully have the type of conversation that Chernoh was describing. Sadibou Marong is a journalist and the Sub-Saharan Africa Bureau Chief for Reporters Without Borders, based in Senegal. Zubaida Ismail is a freelance journalist and Ghana's correspondent for Reporters Without Borders.

I brought them both into the studio along with Chernoh, and we discussed the state of press freedom in countries across Africa, what the struggle for independent journalism in these countries can teach the rest of the world, and the broader relationship between independent media and Democratic health. Here is our conversation.

Chernoh Bah, Sadibou Marong, and Zubaida Ismail, thank you all for coming on to Trending Globally.

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: Thank you for having us.

CHERNOH BAH: Thank you very much for having us.

DAN RICHARDS: I'm really looking forward to talking with you all, and I was thinking we could just start with some of the most pressing challenges you all have either observed or experienced in how you're thinking about these issues the press are facing in different parts of Africa.

And Sadibou, I want to start with you. You recently wrote an article about threats towards press freedom and press safety for journalists in the Sahel. How would you describe the state of press freedom in the region today?

SADIBOU MARONG: If you will take the case of those countries in the Sahel, Mali, Burkina, Niger, and even Chad because they are in the same geographical area, I mean, the issue is quite difficult for journalists. Now, we are having-- we are seeing a lot of them being conscripted to the army.

This is something which is quite new and problematic in a country like Burkina Faso, where they have done now is all the dissenting voices, including those journalists who are very critical. Now, they are forcibly sent to the army in the name of what the president says is a kind of decree, mobilization decree.

And it's a move which has started last year and now, which is still continuing. We also have the issue of journalists going into exile in that country because they are fearing arbitrary arrest. Now, we have nearly a dozen of them outside of the country, and this is quite problematic.

DAN RICHARDS: And so has this really become a more pronounced issue. And that first example you mentioned of leaders conscripting journalists into the army, has this all become more serious as there have been more military conflicts in the region, and it's using military conflicts as an excuse to work against journalists?

SADIBOU MARONG: Yes. I mean, yes, there is that. For example, we have the case of Mali. We also have the case of Niger. And they are also using some problematic laws, for example, the cybercrime law, a anti-terror law.

And they are also trying to hijack a lot of initiatives which might come from journalists or journalists fraternity. This is something we have seen, namely in a countries ruled by military. For example, the case of Guinea, which is currently run by a junta. And the case in Guinea now, we are also seeing not people conscripted to the army, but people who are victims of enforced disappearance.

We are following the case of Habib Marwan Camara, who is a journalist, who has the reputation to be very critical because of his outlet, doing a lot of investigative journalists. Up since December now, he went missing. And no one knows where he is. No one knows. Even his wife did has no news of where he is. This is also problematic.

DAN RICHARDS: Zubaida, you're not only a reporter. You are a media trainer. And you work with other journalists. And I wonder, what are the biggest challenges you see journalists facing today in the regions where you work?

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: So when it comes to Ghana, where I come from, I wouldn't really say that we've got issues of an attack on press freedom. Because after our Nineteen Ninety-Two Constitution and after our independence, we really haven't had such incidents until we came a bit close to something like that in the last eight years.

And I can make-- I can mention names because of course I am Reporters Without Borders representative in Ghana. So I had to report these incidents directly to my bosses in Senegal and in Paris. And so we had the case of two journalists, Caleb and Zoe.

They were picked up right at work by men in military uniform, supposed to be Saints from the National Security, simply because Caleb, as part of his journalism work, chanced on some ambulances that were purchased with taxpayers' money and have been left to rot by the previous government just because it wasn't them that purchased it.

So we had lots of ambulances sitting somewhere wasting, and yet they were being told that they were going to use taxpayers' money again to bring in new ambulances. So this guy churns on the ambulances rotting in a bush, and he took pictures.

The place wasn't a security zone. It's in the open. And so he takes these pictures and writes that he's asked to delete them. But as smartly as he was, right when he took it, he sent it to Zoe, who was in the office. But when they seized his phone, they realized that he had already transferred the pictures to a colleague.

And so what did they do? They had to go to the office, pick the lady. She ran for her life. And last year, I was opportune to be in a program, where she was asked about her experience. A year later, she thought she had gone over that trauma and all that.

When she started talking, she broke down. And it's the first time in my adult life, and in the 13 years of my practice as a journalist, that I saw something came close to all these things we hear about what's going on in other African countries.

But at least from January until now, we're back on track because there is a new government who seem to be more friendly to the media. Of course, there are some elements that also wouldn't want to be held accountable.

DAN RICHARDS: Like what?

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: So what is happening right now is that even though we don't have governments, or state engineered, or state sponsored press freedom issues, we have citizens themselves attacking journalists. So that is what Ghana is facing now. We are having a big issue in Ghana, which is illegal mining.

They are destroying our forest, and our water bodies, and all that. And so you have journalists going after these miners. And that is where the attacks come from. Every day, I report almost every week. I report an attack on a journalist from Ghana.

And the citizens that are attacking journalists, because they are caught in acts that they are not supposed to be caught in, and so they end up venting their anger on the journalists, unlike previously, where we had state sponsored attacks on journalists. So that is what we are dealing with more of citizens attacking the journalists and not state sponsored ones.

DAN RICHARDS: And when you say citizens, it sounds like you're describing also businesses are being reported on or illegal activities, and they have an interest in keeping them secret?

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: Precisely. Because they are doing an illegality. And then these journalists are risking their lives to expose them.

DAN RICHARDS: Chernoh, I want to turn to you. Listeners will have heard some of your experience reporting on government corruption, among other things, in Sierra Leone. I guess I wonder how you think about these types of threats to journalists, which you have also experienced firsthand. And also, what is the effect of these threats on citizens, on consumers of the news, like what is lost in a society when + types of threats occur?

CHERNOH BAH: Yeah, just hearing these stories drives the chills down my shoulders. It's a terrible situation. But it illustrates, in my view, the general crisis of democracy that we are witnessing all around the world now looking at the media.

And I think this is why a conversation like this is necessary because it highlights how it manifests itself in different places, whether it's overt aggression, conscripting journalists to fight, or sending them to an island, banishing them, where they are kept incommunicado or proxy repression, as we see through corporations that are involved in mining activities.

So what this shows is the intolerance that we experience generally globally to the divergence in ideas. I think we cannot have a free society or a democratized society, where people are opposed to differences in opinions about the kind of society that we want. If you have a military regime, everybody has to support that regime.

So there is no difference. They don't want to entertain any kind of difference. If you have a government that is badly elected, they do not want any other idea that tends to espouse a different pathway to a free society. And it becomes a problem when we focus on legitimacy as the only-- once a government is elected, they have a legitimate popular mandate.

They have a right, they have a license to do whatever they like because that's a mandate. So the logic of governance becomes one that is in the possession of those who appear to have commanded the so-called legitimacy by the electoral process. So we have to revisit these ideas of legitimacy, sovereignty, and what mandate actually means, what democracy means.

It doesn't mean that if you won an election, whether it's through a larger margin or a tiny margin, you have a license to do whatever you like. So I think hearing these stories, we are dealing with a crisis of governance, a crisis of democracy.

DAN RICHARDS: Another way journalists and the press generally has been threatened around the world in the last few years especially, beyond explicit repression and threats, is the profusion of what we in the United States call fake news and the way technology has enabled so many different media outlets to multiply, and challenge each other, and a different one regime can call the other side's media fake news. How do you think about those as issues to fact based transparent journalism?

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: So in Ghana, yes, we also have that fake news thing. For me, I think first of all, as a media trainer, usually I ask people, what is fake news? At what point do you determine or do you label a story fake news?

People will use the tag, just like we saw in the president of America's first regime, I don't know whether he's still doing it, but in his previous government, he tagged the CNN as fake news agency. And everything they brought out, he would just simply put that tag, they're fake.

And that is what most politicians in Ghana are doing right now. There was an incident actually recently, where a member of parliament, he's a key member of the opposition new patriotic party who, during a press conference, which was being carried live on TV, when one person from the multimedia company decided to ask a question, right on air, he identified or just said, oh, you are from this station. You guys only carry fake news.

And for a whole week, it was a calculated attack on that particular media house. But fortunately, Ghanaians resisted it. We didn't allow it to fester as a country. There was fierce resistance on social media. Ghanaians were ready to protect their own, to protect their journalists and media house against the politicians.

And so we resisted it, and it just died off within that short period. So that was, again, our semblance of what the CNNs and all that went through in the US. So yes, you as a journalist, you just have to be firm. You just have to make sure before you put out a story, you really got all your facts right. So when they come to say it's a fake story, you just throw the facts to the public and let the public determine whether it's a fake story or not.

DAN RICHARDS: Sadibou?

SADIBOU MARONG: Yes. From what we have observed recently in relation to fake news, and I mean, the mix of fake news and disinformation in Africa, it's really a bigger trend. It might be election time, for example. And we have seen and monitored the fact how, for example, during those times, which are very crucial for the life of the nations in Africa, how politicians themselves, they have been the perpetrators of the development of a very viral fake news against the competitors or sometimes also this happens via some outlets, media outlets, which has been, set up by people who are presented as journalists.

But when you dig deeper, you will realize that these are not journalists, they are politicians or staffs from politicians. This is something real. And we have seen it in countries like Zimbabwe, in Nigeria a bit, and in other countries like even Senegal also.

And the other thing is also how they are being a smear campaign against journalists, many of whom have been caught in those strategies to develop disinformation, to attack them, or to develop some fake news around their stories. The recent one is, for example, what we have seen-- I think it was two days back in the case of DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, where, for example, there is a war in the East of the country.

And then one of the international outlets reporting is Radio France International, which is covering a lot the country. Some of the voiceover of the reporters on the ground have been changed negatively. And that brings to us to the issue of artificial intelligence also, how this is a very positive in one way, but it can have a lot of bad repercussions and impact. And then we also have been doing a lot of efforts to train journalists, to help newsrooms, try to learn how to debunk all these fake news.

DAN RICHARDS: That brings up something I wanted to ask about as well, which is ways that you see journalists are pushing back against these variety of threats, whether they are more subtle threats or more explicit threats. Are there any examples that stand out to you of how journalists and citizens are working to share important information in their countries and communities?

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: Yeah, so for the multimedia example I gave, what they did was that they made sure that that particular story that the journalist reported on, which triggered that attack on live TV, was that they repeatedly played that story just to let people know that we stand by our reporter and we stand by our story.

They repeatedly playing that. And then on social media, you had colleagues from other media stations, not even from where the young man was working, from other media houses, reposting that story and insisting that the member of Parliament was wrong.

You had people reposting that story and writing #IStandByThisPerson. So this is how not even only from the media house point, but even colleague journalists rallied behind this guy's story. Because if he had been quiet, what it was going to mean was that people would willingly begin to tag all of us, and we realized it was going to be a danger that we weren't going to be able to curb if we allowed it to fester. And that's how come we were able to silence that politician, and he never has tried it again.

DAN RICHARDS: That's an inspiring story in some ways, especially. I wish we would see more of that in the United States media. Sadibou?

SADIBOU MARONG: Yeah. And I want to add following Zubaida's examples. They are also in very vibrant initiatives coming from Africans themselves, like the-- actually, we have the case of Africa Check, which is a local African organization with a headquarters in Dakar, in Joburg, in Nigeria also. And at the country level also, we have seen the emergence of various country of fact checking organizations, like Ghana Check that exists also.

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: We have Ghana Facts.

SADIBOU MARONG: Ghana Facts. Yes, Ghana Facts. Fact Check Ghana. We also have Congo Check, which is very, very vibrant from Mali, check from a country to another. But what we are pleading is at the level of the journalist training school, for example, the last year of training might be also have some modules on fact checking how to debunk all those so that a young journalist, when they came into the market, they have already all those abilities.

So that even when going reporting, for example, they also can-- or if they receive an information, they can try to see what is the fake, what is not the fake, what is the true, what is not the true, and so, and so that. The community might-- you can provide to the community the real information.

It is quite important to have journalists trained, and well trained, and journalists able and willing to fight that. It will start, not at the outlet level, at the media level itself, but it will start at the J-school level, where people, they will come out with all those abilities.

DAN RICHARDS: So where journalists are really actually being trained in the trade, you think is an important part of the puzzle as well.

SADIBOU MARONG: Absolutely.

DAN RICHARDS: Chernoh, what examples stand out to you or where do you See-- How do you see a path forward to rebuild the relationship of a free press and a Democratic societies?

CHERNOH BAH: Yes, I think all of these problems are present us with opportunities and challenges at the same time. The liberation of the instruments of mass communication, the new technology, and all these have armed journalists. But at the same time, as we've heard from my colleagues here, it has also posed a significant challenge to the profession of journalism and even largely the Democratic space.

Because it deals with the question of narrative control. You cannot dominate a society without controlling a narrative. So this is where the criminalization of free speech, the harassment of journalists is coming from. So, I mean, journalists, with the necessary skills and tools to be able to challenge that and to understand that these kinds of tendencies are going to happen, whether we have a properly elected or badly elected president, or we have military leaders that deals with the idea that hegemonic control of narrative, and resources, and political space is going to produce all of these negative manifestations.

So at the level of professionalization of the media has to include skills to challenge that information verification mechanisms. How do we verify in the newsroom? It used to be the case in the past, where the editorial process itself was a peer reviewed fact checking process, where you make sure all the boxes are checked.

But then we are now enter the stage with this liberalization of the media, enter the space of new information warfare, where politicians and states, corporate organizations have developed new techniques of repression. And that includes the criminalization of the press, dissenting voices, criminalizing them, and also invalidating what is good standard practice.

So I'm hoping that moving forward with these kind of conversations, we will all agree on what should count as news, how do we build solidarity across frontiers. Because this is not just a Ghanaian problem, a Senegalese problem, a Sierra Leonean problem. It's a universal problem, how do we build solidarity across the board and be able to identify repression for what it is?

DAN RICHARDS: Speaking of international cooperation and solidarity, we're in Rhode Island right now in the United States, about to have a conference looking at the media and democracy in Africa. You all have worked with international organizations to varying degrees. What do you see as the role of international organizations, whether it's universities, or nonprofits, or NGOs, in helping to support local journalists?

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: I think it's more of allowing local journalists tell this story. I've always been one person who advocates for African voices. I sit back, and I see media houses like Radio France, AP News, and all these media houses. They are mostly heavily in Kenya and Senegal. Their headquarters are there.

And when you go in there, you see a pure-- I'm not being a racist here, but I'm being realistic. You see a pure white person. And then the portfolio is West Africa editor, Radio France International. West African editor, AP News.

And I'm like, hello? Are you telling us that in the whole of Senegal, in the whole of Kenya, in the whole of West Africa, you couldn't find a Black skinned Indigenous African person to head your African desk? The thing is that we are still not allowing Africans to tell their stories.

If you think that we don't have the resources and you are collaborating with us to tell our stories, then let us lead the storytelling effort. We are getting the collaborations not so perfect, but at least we are getting the collaboration. But my point is that let Africans tell their stories.

Stop putting your people as editors. You can be at the background and support, but let us make the final decision on what stories go out. Because we know our stories. And we can tell our stories better than any other person.

SADIBOU MARONG: Yes, I believe so also. But where I would like to insist in terms of speaking to the academics in the wider world, academics, to me, will have to explore more and more in terms of research. It is a call, for example, to add sun or any other universities in the US.

Unfortunately, we are also facing a situation, where some political decisions like those Trump have has taken, for example, they will be also used by some African dictators as an example or to jeopardize the media freedom, for example. Today, we have seen how it is the situation with voice of America that they will say, look, this has been done by Trump, and we are going to do that here, and no one will cry.

This is quite difficult. Media is so important in our cultures. In the African cultures, we can't say democracy without media. Media people needs to be respected, promoted, and also need to be given All the possibility to exercise freely without fear and reprisals.

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: I want to also acknowledge the fact that it's always been a problem. I've always told the scientists in my country that, look, you guys are too scientific. When you bring other researchers, and we give you the platform to come and speak to us, you come and you are speaking to these big jargons.

Look, the ordinary Ghanaian doesn't understand it. So they don't make sense of what you're saying. And that is why you don't really see the impact. You don't see any change. Because the fact is that they don't understand the jargons.

So what we've always told them that when you bring out your researchers, engage the journalists. Let us put what we call a human face on those researches. And how do you do that? By collaborating, by engaging us. So together, we can achieve that goal.

But if not, the researchers are going to always be-- especially typically from where I come from, the researchers will end up on the shelves, and they will gather dust, and will do nothing about it. So thank you for this opportunity. And also we want to see more of these collaborations.

DAN RICHARDS: Absolutely. Well, Chernoh, I'll leave it to you for the last word.

CHERNOH BAH: I think they have already summed it up, but the lessons are obvious. What we're talking about here is a universal situation. We are in a period in the moment, where the academy is also under attack. Academic freedom, free speech, media freedom.

We are all facing the same assault. There's a lot that we can benefit to have journalists and academics talk to each other, find a common ground, where we will be able to develop ways to defend and promote free speech and an open society.

DAN RICHARDS: Zubaida, Sadibou, Chernoh, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

CHERNOH BAH: Thank you.

ZUBAIDA ISMAIL: Thank you for having us.

SADIBOU MARONG: Thank you for having us.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards, with production assistance from Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield with additional music from the Blue Dot Sessions. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you haven't subscribed to Trending Globally, please do that too. If you want to learn more about the conference that was hosted at the Watson Institute's Africa Initiative this spring, you can watch all of the lectures and discussions on our YouTube channel. We'll put a link to it in the show notes.

And if you have any questions or suggestions for guests or topics for Trending Globally, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word, trendingglobally@brown.edu. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally.

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