Journal

Arguments we are willing to have in public.

Positions on public sector communications and public narrative in Africa — written for the people who commission this work, and occasionally against the way they commission it.

Public narrative

12 June 2026 · 6 min

Communication is infrastructure, and budgets should say so

A road with no story is a road with no constituency. We argue for treating public communication as a core line in programme design, not the 2% left at the end.

Full essay publishing soon

Craft

28 April 2026 · 8 min

Why most development communication fails before it is written

It fails in the approval chain. Six specific habits — from consensus copy to donor-first framing — that reliably strip a message of everything that made it land.

Full essay publishing soon

Climate

3 March 2026 · 7 min

Climate is not a future tense in East Africa

The dominant global framing puts climate impact somewhere ahead of us. Reporting from Afar, Turkana, and Somaliland requires a grammar that is already present tense.

Full essay publishing soon

Production

19 January 2026 · 5 min

The case against parachute production

Flying in a crew for eight days does not just cost more. It changes what people are willing to say on camera, and you can see it in the footage.

Full essay publishing soon