Passmark bagged two nominations at this year’s awards
Wits Journalism lecturer, Laura Grant is a nominee in this year’s Global Editors’ Network’s Data Journalism Awards. The nominated project, Passmark, co-created with Alastair Otter is a data platform that sets out to give a clearer picture of the state of schools in South Africa by collecting the data and presenting it in ways that make it useful to parents, pupils, and educators.
The data for the website is sourced from various education departments, NGO’s and other authorities working in the education sector. Once the data is cleaned to ensure reliability and integrity, it is merged with other datasets to produce detailed insights into the state of education in the country and the forces affecting it.
Map of schools without basic infrastructure that have been upgraded.
Passmark is the only African-based project nominated in this year’s Global Editor’s Network’s Data Journalism Award ‘Public Choice’ category. The 11 projects shortlisted in the category can be found here. Passmark is also nominated in the Website of the Year category.
The project was made possible by funding from the Taco Kuiper Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Out of 630 entries, 99 nominations made this year’s shortlist in the 12 categories available, each representing the best data-driven work that was done in the past year across five continents.
Other projects from the African continent shortlisted in the final categories include:
· Road to Nowhere, africanDRONE, South Africa
o Category: Innovation in data journalism
· Nancharts Code for Africa & Code for Nigeria, Nigeria
o Category: Best data journalism team — small
· InfoTimes, Egypt
o Category: Best data journalism team — small
The Data Journalism Awards ceremony takes place on 31 May 2018 in Lisbon during the GEN Summit.
