Story Lab
Training African storytellers to record their own communities properly — consent, audio and all.
Story Lab is how VOAC scales without diluting. Rather than flying members in to cover a community, we train people already in that community to record it — on the phone in their pocket.
The curriculum is short and practical: how to ask for consent and record that you have it, how to get usable audio in a room with a tin roof, how to write a caption that does journalistic work, and how to hand the material back to the person it belongs to.
It is the first thing every VOAC member does, because it is the standard every story on this site will be held to. Everyone trained keeps the rights to what they record; VOAC publishes it only if they want us to.
What it produces
- A mobile-first field guide to consent-led recording, in English and French
- Trained community recorders who own their own material
- The first stories on this site — recorded to the standard, not before
Where it runs
- Ghana
- Côte d'Ivoire
- Benin
The issues it answers
A programme with no problem behind it is a press release. These are the ones that justify this programme existing.
Across the continent · Media
Africa is still mostly described by people who do not live here
The stories that reach the world about African communities are rarely told by those communities, in their own languages, on their own terms.
The issue, and what we intend to do →Across the continent · Arts
Whole communities depend on knowledge held by one person
The engineer who keeps the transmitter alive, the elder who knows the seed, the craftsperson with the technique — when they leave, nothing is written down.
The issue, and what we intend to do →Ghana · Media
Community radio in Ghana runs on borrowed engineers
Stations that reach tens of thousands of listeners in Twi, Hausa and Ewe are kept on air by a handful of volunteers, most of them retired, with nobody trained to follow them.
The issue, and what we intend to do →Côte d'Ivoire · Media
Côte d'Ivoire's young audio producers have skill, kit and no route to communities
Abidjan has a generation of producers who can record, cut and publish on a phone — and communities two hours away whose accounts have never been recorded properly.
The issue, and what we intend to do →How to take part
If you run a community radio station, a youth group or a cooperative and want a lab, write to us. If you are a producer or photographer who wants to teach one, apply to join.