ICIR announces successful fellows for SPARK 2 Project – See full list

The International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) has announced successful fellows for its “Strengthening Public Accountability for Results and Knowledge (SPARK 2) Project”.

According to a statement signed by Ayisat Abiona, Programs Officer, ICIR, the Project, which is executed with the support of the International Budget Partnerships (IBP), aims to examine factors contributing to the appalling state of maternal healthcare in Nigeria, despite government intervention, and systemic issues affecting the agricultural production by smallholder women farmers through a systems-level approach. Particularly  from the perspective of intersectionality of gender. The project’s focal states are Oyo, Anambra, Niger, Jigawa, Nasarawa, Kano and Ogun States.

For the agriculture sector reporting, our focus is on the daunting challenges that smallholder women farmers face in terms of lack of access to resources credit, grants,  farm inputs, land and information needed for their agricultural business. They frequently lack the resources or capital to farm at a commercially viable scale and have little motivation to do more than is necessary for them to make a living. This is mostly due to their restricted access to farmlands, markets, loans, credit and grants, support services and inputs, all of which would have allowed them to boost their output and sales volumes. For the agric sector reporting, our focal states are Anambra, Jigawa, Nasarawa, Niger, and Oyo. For the health sector reporting, we are concentrating on the Basic Healthcare Provision Fund (BHCPF) and the Midwives Service Scheme (MSS) two key interventions of the government in the Nigerian health sector which have been confronted with numerous challenges, particularly because of inadequate budgetary allocations, misappropriation of funds and poor monitoring system. While the government has launched several reform measures to address various challenges in the health sector, basic healthcare services continue to elude ordinary Nigerians, particularly the most vulnerable people who live in rural areas. The Nigerian healthcare delivery system is so unreliable that most influential people, including political leaders and even Presidents, abandon it and travel abroad for medical treatment. Our focal states for the health sector reporting are Anambra, Kano, Niger, Ogun and Oyo.

The project will address significant challenges, and power relations and provide system-level evidence across the two thematic areas on challenges in the delivery of BHCPF, MSS, and the Agriculture Development Projects across SPARK’s focal states – focusing on systemic, political, and economic issues such as inadequate budgetary support, the influence of party politics in policy, gender disparities as well as cultural and other nuanced influences that impact on outcomes. 

According to ICIR, the project will build the capacity of journalists to hold power bearers, policymakers, and implementers accountable by publishing focused special and investigative reports and documentaries on delivery end at Primary Health Cares, Ward Development Committees, and across commodity groups within SWOFON networks in the focal states to report and investigate the health and agriculture sectors.

The ICIR is an independent, non–profit media organisation that aims to promote good governance in Nigeria through robust investigative, data-driven reporting. We aim to build a culture of watchdog reporting for the media in Nigeria. We achieve this by building the Investigative/Data Journalism capacity for journalists in newsrooms nationwide.   

For this project, 20 journalists were selected from the states of Oyo, Anambra, Niger, Jigawa, Nasarawa, Kano, and Ogun across print, electronic and digital media.

The list of the successful candidates and their respective organisations is below: