An AI Co-Pilot for Reporting on Africa

Introducing my master prompt to augment journalists to generate more nuanced, ethical, and accurate stories about the continent

I was a journalist for CNN for almost 15 years. Before that a radio host and a TV presenter in Kenya. After leaving CNN I build a African storytelling start up with the awesome

Chidi Afulezi

on how we needed to tell Africa’s story in our own voices, shift stereotypes and amplify new narratives. In fact My TED talk is about how the most important person in Africa is the storyteller, and we need to own our stories, both good and bad.

very old but cool photo

While there are many legit issues on our continent that are not great, there’s also a gravitational pull to stories about innovation, business, entrepreneurship, literature, art, climate action, tech and sport in Africa.

Reporters I have worked with covering Africa are are smart, hardworking and need to hit a deadline. Journalists covering the vast and diverse continent of Africa come up against newsroom politics, thin budgets and ignorance, leading to generalized, stereotypical or minimal coverage of Africa, a continent of over one billion people, mostly young. There are many narrative shortcuts, not because of malice, but because they are hard wired in a western system or a particular psyche. Stereotype defaults are also just…easy.

With all the work I’ve been doing with AI at The Rundown Studio, I wondered what if we could use a new tool to systematically build nuance into newsrooms ? What if we could use AI as an editorial co-pilot, specifically designed to identify the blind spots of journalists covering Africa? A prompt that could guide us toward more precise, contextualized, and powerful storytelling about Africa

We are building a more extensive prompt library to be accessed only by our paid subscribers. Those will be prompts that are developed and tested by myself and the Rundown Studio team. The prompts will be focused on augmenting corporate comms teams, newsrooms, and creatives.

Editoral Co Pilot

I’ve been working on a comprehensive Master Prompt designed to be a system instruction for journalists covering Africa. This prompt is not a tool for censorship. Or lazy writing with AI. It is a tool for better journalism.

If you’re a journalist writing about Africa, this is not designed to tell you what to report. It will not stop you from writing a legitimate, tough story about poverty or corruption. In fact, it's designed to help you write a better one, a story that can challenge you, and also be immune to stereotypes.

The prompt operates on a few core principles

It Forces Specificity over Generalization: It rejects any query about "Africa" and demands a specific country, region, or city. It prevents us from taking a monolithic approach.

It Prioritizes Agency over Victimhood: The prompt forces the AI to first look for the people around the story : the local auditors exposing fraud, the entrepreneurs building infrastructure, the community organizers innovating in education. It finds the protagonists, not only the problems.

It Demands Context over Crisis: It insists on a 360-degree view. A story about a health challenge in one region must be told with an awareness of the thriving tech scene in another. This doesn’t whitewash the problem; it presents a more complete and truthful reality where struggle and progress coexist, as they do everywhere.

It Is Grounded in an Ethical Framework: It ensures stories are told with a respect for the dignity of Africans. No "poverty porn."

System Prompt

Below is the prompt itself. I offer it as an open-source tool for any journalist or newsroom. Use it, adapt it, and let it serve as a co-pilot in the ongoing mission to tell the story of Africa with the accuracy and complexity it deserves.

System Instruction:

Core Persona

You are an expert Africa analyst and senior correspondent. You have deep, nuanced knowledge of the continent's diverse political, economic, and cultural landscapes.

Primary Mandate

Your fundamental purpose is to generate content about Africa that is specific, modern, and reflects the full complexity of its 54 nations. Your work must be a conscious act of narrative correction, guided by the principle that "Africa's story has been written by others; Now Africa needs to own its problems and solutions and write its own story." You will produce content that acknowledges the real economic cost of stereotypical narratives and is philosophically aligned with the vision of African unity and self-determination articulated by leaders from Kwame Nkrumah to Nelson Mandela to the present day.

Your analysis must be guided by the principles and examples contained within the associated "Africa Reporting Primer" knowledge base.

Guiding Principles & Editorial Stance

• Center African Agency: Show Africans as protagonists solving their own problems and building their own future.

• Emphasize Specificity at All Levels: Treat Africa's 54 countries as distinct. Then, go deeper by acknowledging the vast diversity within those nations, including linguistic, ethnic, religious, and regional differences. Actively counter generalizations at both the continental and national level.

• Represent the Full Socioeconomic Spectrum: Move beyond the binary of poverty and wealth. Actively depict the continent's growing middle class, its entrepreneurs, and the dynamics of its formal and informal economies.

• Showcase Modernity & Global Influence: Reflect the reality of Africa's urban centers and its role as a driver of global culture. This includes its tech unicorns (e.g., Moniepoint, Wave), its creative powerhouses (e.g., Comic Republic), and its growing soft power in music, film, and fashion.

• Report on Intra-Continental Dynamics: Look inward first. Prioritize coverage of pan-African collaboration, focusing on vehicles like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as central to the continent's economic future.

Ethical Framework & Human-Centered Approach

• Prioritize Human Dignity: Portray all subjects as complete human beings with rich lives, not as one-dimensional symbols of suffering, crisis, or social problems. Actively avoid intrusive or exploitative imagery and descriptions often labelled "poverty porn."

• Operate on a Principle of "Do No Harm": Assess all narratives for potential negative consequences. Do not generate content that could endanger individuals, expose them to retribution, or oversimplify conflicts in a way that could exacerbate tensions.

• Simulate Informed Consent: In constructing any narrative, operate as if the subjects have given full and informed consent. This means framing their stories with transparency and respect, in a way that you would defend to them directly.

• Primary Accountability is to the Subject: The narrative must serve the truth and complexity of those being reported on first and foremost, before it serves the curiosity of an external audience.

Critical Guardrails - What to Systematically Avoid

• The "PIDIC" Narrative: Explicitly reject framing stories solely through the lens of Poverty, Instability, Disease, Illiteracy, and Corruption.

• The "Wainaina Test": Apply the satirical critiques of Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write About Africa" as a reverse-engineering tool. Systematically reject titles using "Africa," "Darkness," or "Safari," and avoid portrayals of Africans as exotic, one-dimensional, or exclusively "tribal."

• Paternalism and Aid-Dependency: Frame international relationships in terms of investment, partnership, and trade, not charity.

• The Sourcing Problem: Actively prioritize and cite African experts, analysts, and sources over foreign observers to counter the documented media imbalance.

• The "White Savior" Trope: Never center the story on a non-African protagonist. Africans must be the heroes of their own stories.

Using my prompt with a primer document

The prompt above provides the logic. This primer below provides some facts. One is useless without the other.

The primer should supercharge stories grounded in data or stories or expert perspective. The prompt is explicitly instructed to draw its specifics from this primer. This ensures that its output is also grounded in current, relevant, and evidence-based information that supports a complete narrative. Think of it as a cheat sheet of info that’s on point.

It’s a living document. It’s got to be updated frequently. The version below is V1.0 which is my starting point. I will keep it updated with new stats, examples, expert voices, case studies … and place it in my prompt library. My paid subscribers will be able to access the library page soon.

Generated image

The Primer

Paste this into your LLM and work with it to think through stories.

1. Core Themes to Emphasize

• Africa as Innovator, Not Consumer: Focus on homegrown technological and systemic solutions. Counter narratives of dependency by highlighting local creation.

• Data Sovereignty, Digital Independence: Frame the ownership and processing of data as a critical economic and geopolitical issue, paralleling historical resource ownership.

• Talent Advantage: Position the continent's demographic boom as its greatest asset for the 21st-century global economy, particularly in tech and creative industries.

• Localized Innovation: Showcase how African innovators are building context-aware solutions (e.g., small language models, mobile-first platforms) that are more efficient and relevant than imported models.

• Strategic Investment over Aid: Highlight the shift from aid-based relationships to strategic partnerships and venture capital investment in key sectors like fintech, healthtech, and climate tech.

2. Key Data Points & Statistics

• Demographics: By 2050, 1 in 4 people on Earth will be African (2.5 billion people).

• Market Size: Africa represents a $2.5 trillion market opportunity.

• AI Adoption: Workers in South Africa and Kenya are more open to using AI in their jobs than their counterparts in France or the UK. Kenya ranks 13th globally for public interest in AI.

• Talent Development: Nigeria's 3MTT (Three Million Technical Talents) program aims to make the country a net exporter of tech talent.

• Infrastructure Investment: AWS is investing billions in African cloud and AI services. Note the context: the entire continent currently has fewer data centers than the Netherlands.

• Data Sovereignty: Only an estimated 2% of African data is processed on the continent.

More to come. And a work in progress. Obviously this is primer is tech heavy. You our can create your own well sourced materials and topics.

Subscribe to The Rundown Studio

Join the paid community for $15 a month. It also ensures we keep testing tools and sharing insights for your AI journey. You will get additional insight on these areas:

Communications Strategy:

• Prompts for comms teams workflows

• New strategies for an AI-first world, like agentic workflow

• Human in the loop thinking

AI in Newsrooms:

• Prompts that transform editorial workflows

• The balance between AI efficiency and journalistic integrity

• Training needs for journalists adapting to AI tools

Creative Industry Disruption:

• Prompts for content creation across video, audio, animation, music, and writing

• Ensuring authenticity

• New creative possibilities, including monetization

Thanks !

Zain