How the “Swahili Wikileaks” built trust by breaking Big Tech's playbook

A case study on JamiiAfrica, a social platform where posts save lives — and get government results

JamiiForums, currently rebranding as JamiiAfrica, is an East African nonprofit and social network with a vision that sets it apart from its global counterparts: “Netizens making informed decisions.” To achieve this, JamiiAfrica has spent the past 20 years developing a unique hybrid of journalism and content moderation while navigating a fraught political environment.

Though little known on the international stage, JamiiAfrica has outperformed both local news outlets and major social media platforms at times, and demand is growing. While most Tanzanians speak Swahili, the official language, English is widely spoken in East Africa and Jamii moderators also monitor English-language forums dedicated to regional neighbors like Uganda.

In December, I joined International Media Support on a week-long research trip to JamiiAfrica headquarters in Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. IMS has an office in Tanzania and has funded and worked closely with JamiiAfrica for years. I visited with IMS Public Interest Tech Advisor Magnus Ag, looking for examples of digital infrastructure designed to serve democracy better than Big Tech’s offerings.

Reeling a little from the abrupt switch between the Northern European winter at home and the equatorial rainy season in the bustling coastal city, we settled into the conference room in Jamii’s elegant suburban office building and interviewed as many people as we could over cups of coffee and bowls of local cashew nuts.

Jamii means “community” in Swahili, and the organization became a nonprofit in 2017. Internal strategic plans for the next four years aim for nothing less than a “more informed citizenry, a responsive government, and increased citizen participation across democratic, economic, and governance agendas.” This is particularly relevant in a country governed by the same ruling party for over 60 years and ramping up to general elections in October.

The BBC has called JamiiAfrica the “Swahili Wikileaks,” given its origins exposing corruption, including a scandal that brought down a prime minister and his cabinet in 2008. In the years that followed, founder Maxence Melo was repeatedly prosecuted by local authorities. In 2015, journalists even nicknamed new cybercrime legislation “the Jamii Forums law.” But after years of dialogue, the platform’s relationship with government officials has improved. Today, Melo serves on a data commission established after JamiiAfrica helped draft a data protection act.

JamiiAfrica’s values, including serving the community and challenging corruption, are signaled in its text-heavy web app, which I clicked through recently with the help of Google Translate. The top posts I saw on two consecutive days were football-related, but it doesn’t take long for a casual visitor to stumble across projects like Jamii Check, their in-house fact checking program — one of many ways the platform diverges from current global norms for online conversation. Under the surface, JamiiAfrica’s forums are also deeply innovative, and rely heavily on stewardship from experienced content moderators and managers.

Madeline Earp, Maxence Melo, and Magnus Ag, courtesy of JamiiAfrica

Everything’s in moderation

Anyone can participate in JamiiAfrica’s forums anonymously or under a pseudonym, and posts are public by default. Staff monitor for illegal content, and the platform risks legal liability if they fail to remove it within 12 hours.

Content moderation in East Africa, as elsewhere, has been described as “horrifying and distressing” work. But JamiiAfrica’s soft spoken lead content manager Shiija Masele couldn’t suppress a smile when, in her office in Dar es Salaam, I asked tentatively about her typical day. “You’ll find me laughing,” she said. “It’s fun, I enjoy doing it. I love it.”

Masele, an artist and political scientist, first met Melo when she entered one of her paintings in Stories of Change, an annual JamiiAfrica contest that invites citizens to submit visions of a better Tanzania — often prompting official action. She now works alongside a team of about 40 people with backgrounds in fields like economics, civil engineering, and journalism.

Most juggle so many roles that it’s hard to disentangle individual portfolios, but Masele is primarily responsible for 11 content managers who work in rotating 8-hour shifts to review the roughly 500 submissions the platform receives each day. JamiiAfrica’s largest team is tasked with amplifying forum content on platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Most staff start out monitoring the forums as a way to learn the ropes.

In Melo’s view, broad expertise is critical not just for the organization’s resilience, but for the health of the wider information ecosystem. “You need to train your team to understand how manipulation works,” he said. JamiiAfrica has weathered interference, including from bot accounts and cyberattacks that appear to originate abroad, but could have been funded by anyone threatened by the forums’ commitment to exposing wrongdoing in Tanzanian government and business.

Masele and her team also edit, fact check, and correct user-generated content, a significant departure from standard practice at many Big Tech social media firms. They are not merely spellchecking, but also restructuring for clarity, changing the title, or making whatever changes they believe will help the post attract more readers. Though some users object, others actually ask for help improving their posts, especially when sharing urgent news, like a fallen bridge, knowing that JamiiAfrica will help them reach the widest possible audience.

Practices of stewardship

“Moderators are just moderating,” Melo said. “Managers are managing the content. It’s content curation, value addition, and moderating, in a mix.”

Masele’s team keeps discussions civil by enforcing community engagement guidelines developed and maintained with user input — vital for preserving a sense of ownership and participation — since 2006. The English version reads: “these are public boards, so act like you would if you were in a public place.” They observe new members closely, and limit certain discussion forums, like religion, to established users.

Posts about breaking news or controversial topics are often merged into a single thread, making them less visible to the public but easier to moderate. And while anyone threatening violence or spamming faces a permanent ban, most users adjust their behavior after a warning or a temporary exclusion, Masele said, because they want to stay part of the conversation.

People can also flag content violations, and posts reported for breaking the rules three times or more are automatically hidden. But if JamiiAfrica staff believe a legitimate post was flagged in an effort to suppress a minority voice or political opponent, for example, they republish with the green check mark that signals it has been vetted.

Through its Jamii Health program, Masele said, the organization has identified people and institutions to provide advice or even real world support in dangerous situations like threats of self-harm. This results in a starkly different relationship between JamiiAfrica and its community, compared to the dominant social platforms, which profit from serving dangerous content to vulnerable young people. “When a person brings an issue, he gets help,” Masele said. “And most of them return to say thank you.”

I asked Masele what advice she would give to people around the world doing this work, which New_ Public often calls community stewardship. “Be understanding, because people come from different backgrounds,” she said. “Be empathetic. [If someone is] very angry, you have to understand where he comes from.” She pauses for a second. “Free your mind.”

John Haramba and Shiija Masele, courtesy of Madeline Earp

Trust in journalism

In addition to its forums, JamiiAfrica remains an important source of news and information for the region: announcing proposed changes to laws, debunking viral falsehoods on social media, mythbusting (is the earth flat?), and sharing digital literacy tips like password security and how to spot deep fakes.

John Haramba, one of two former journalists currently on staff, has over a decade of experience reporting for radio and print news outlets. His former colleagues now bring him the stories they can’t publish in a media industry still facing legal restrictions.

“At the moment, they call me Mr. Impact,“ Haramba said, laughing. “Every day, government responds because they know if Jamii Forums says it, it’s a fact. [In previous jobs] I didn’t have that experience.”

Civic complaints are common, and staff track official statements or actions resulting from forum posts about everything from cell phone service to sewage treatment. Haramba relies on an informal pool of professional journalists who can help him confirm details from public interest forum posts on a freelance basis; their names never appear. Instead, they form part of a chain of people who add to content behind the scenes — moderators, graphic designers, and the Digital for Democracy team — with the ultimate goal of getting information in front of the right audience. Final, vetted results appear with a green check mark.

As Tanzania gears up for general elections in October, the pressure to fact check is only growing, and JamiiAfrica has to try and balance the trust it has built as a watchdog with the success it has achieved working constructively with local authorities.

According to Haramba, “Because we amplify issues which can’t be published in other publications, people think we are criticizing the government.” In his experience, officials who perceived him as antagonistic when he wrote about them under his own byline are now more receptive when he’s just the messenger, amplifying a citizen’s viewpoint in Jamii’s forums. Some institutions, including the anti-corruption bureau, an independent public body which nevertheless reports to the president, have signed agreements with JamiiAfrica pledging to cooperate and share information.

Regional opportunities

In January, JamiiAfrica management began scoping a Uganda-facing project, managed by locals familiar with the regional context. While values-driven online platforms like Front Porch Forum in the United States are rejecting growth in a bid to preserve quality interactions, JamiiAfrica is entering an ambitious expansion phase.

Initially, JamiiAfrica had expected to export only the fact-checking and whistleblowing elements of their project, but interviews revealed demand for forum discussions in Luganda, Uganda’s most widely spoken indigenous language. The future of this Ugandan project could reveal much about whether JamiiAfrica’s approach — primarily in Swahili and English in urban Tanzania — is adaptable to other contexts.

In contrast to US-based projects that espouse similar values, which are often referred to explicitly as the “small web” in contrast to platforms offered by Big Tech, JamiiAfrica hits somewhere in the middle. According to the taxonomy posited by media and public policy scholar Ethan Zuckerman, it might constitute a large “Very Small Online Platform” or a pretty small “Big Room.”

Though it has sustained itself through advertising and paid membership at various points in its history, JamiiAfrica’s current nonprofit status encourages responsible growth in some ways, with its funders — mainly private international development foundations and government agencies — often excited by new ideas and requiring financial transparency. But this also carries an administrative fundraising burden and an element of uncertainty.

For founder Maxence Melo, however, expansion becomes feasible if the solutions in Uganda, or even beyond, are as rooted in the needs of the community as JamiiAfrica has been so far.

“We understand our audience, we understand what’s happening here, we understand why we need this kind of solution,” Melo told me. “We know how it works. We’ve done it.”