Investigative advisor: 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.

Investigative advisor: Alex 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.

Cross-examination advisor: 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.

Investigative advisor: Mark Schapiro

Mark Schapiro has been an environmental journalist for three decades, exploring the intersection between the environment, economics and international political power in books, magazine articles and on television. He was, until recently, the senior correspondent at the Center for Investigative Reporting, the oldest non-profit investigative journalism organization in the world. His reporting probes into the underlying economic and political forces behind environmental abuses.

Data advisor: Adi Eyal

Adi Eyal founded Code for South Africa because he has a strong belief that many of the world’s problems can be solved through data. As with sculptors who see a beautiful statue within a lump of rock. he beliefs that there are diamonds to be found within even the most boring of datasets. His mission, and that of Code for South Africa is to help media and civil society to combine technology and data to promote informed-decision making and drive social change. Code for South Africa has been developing tools to help ministries of health save money on their pharmaceutical purchases, working with journalists to better understand unwieldy datasets such as the census and elections results as well surfacing useful information on laws, medical information, elections and other topics of interest. Under the umbrella of the HacksHackers group of data journalism enthusiasts, they are bringing together journalists and technologists to promote collaborative work. In 2015, they are opening a data journalism school to enrich the next generation of young journalists with the skills they need to succeed in the modern newsroom.

Data advisor: 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.

Digital security advisor: Giovanni Pellerano

Giovanni Pellerano is a computer engineer and security advisor; Passionate security researcher and software developer he is active in various free software communities like Tor2web, Sniffjoke and Contiki. His career started as a security researcher in 2009 at ISGroup. In 2012 he worked at CNIT National Laboratory of Photonic Networks (LNRF) as a consultant in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). Transparency advocate and privacy activist, in 2012 he co-founded the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights where he currently leads the development of GlobaLeaks, a framework for secure whistleblowing initiatives.