MORE, the Media Organization for Representation and Empowerment, is a Minnesota nonprofit and a registered 501(c)(3) charitable organization, EIN 42-2718442. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
We build platforms where Africans and the African diaspora speak for themselves, at length, on the record.
The problem we exist to address is not that Africa goes uncovered. It is that the coverage so often arrives already interpreted, by people explaining a place they do not live in. We put the microphone in the hands of the people who do, and we give them enough time to be understood rather than quoted.
Our Mission
MORE exists so African and African diaspora journalists can practice excellence in journalism from where they stand, without leaving home, and still be taken seriously.
We do that in two ways. We train reporters and equip newsrooms, starting in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where thousands of African immigrants live and work, and in Liberia and Sierra Leone, with the skills and technical infrastructure the work actually requires. And we build the platforms that carry their voices out, including The Africa Desk Live, our weekly two-hour broadcast.
The two halves are one idea. Training without a platform produces skilled journalists nobody hears. A platform without training produces a stage with too few people ready to stand on it. We are building both, at the same time, on purpose.
Why now
Across the continent, the space for independent journalism is narrowing.
In December 2025, Ugandan security forces raided the home of Sarah Bireete, a constitutional lawyer, and held her for a month. The charge stemmed from her public discussion of the national voters' register, a document any citizen can read. Two weeks after her arrest, her organization's operating license was suspended along with those of several others.
Cases like hers change what a program like ours can do. Some weeks, the person best placed to explain a country cannot safely speak from inside it, so we go to the diaspora instead. We are not comfortable with that compromise. That is why the work matters.
Our founder started a human rights newspaper in a refugee camp because no one else would write it. That instinct is still the whole organization: when the story is not being told, build the thing that tells it.
What we have built so far
Since launching in May 2026, The Africa Desk Live has reached more than 390,000 people on Facebook alone, with over 24,000 interactions and 2,500 shares. In the last thirty days, 150,000 viewers watched the program. The audience has grown by more than 10,000 followers in a few months, with no marketing budget and no paid promotion. In a recent single week, viewers in more than 40 countries worldwide watched our program
Twenty episodes. Twenty countries. Thirty-four to go.
What your gift does
A contribution to MORE pays for the parts nobody sees: the broadcast infrastructure, the training, the research behind each episode, and the outreach that finds a scholar in Conakry or a journalist in Dakar and gets them on air.
We currently pay no honoraria, and we sell no seats. Every dollar goes to keeping the microphone open.
Our Vision
A media landscape where Africans and their diaspora produce the best journalism about Africa, and no one finds that surprising.
Where a reporter in Freetown or Kampala isn't a stringer for someone else's story but the authority on her own. Where she is equipped to do the work and safe enough to keep doing it. The question isn't whether an African or diaspora journalist can meet the global standard, but who set that standard and why they were never asked.
We are working toward a day when a foreign correspondent parachuting in to explain the continent looks not offensive but simply unnecessary.
What We Do
We broadcast. The Africa Desk Live goes live every Saturday for two hours, free to watch and free to share. Our current arc, 54 Conversations, gives each of Africa's fifty-four nations a dedicated hour with scholars, journalists, and organizers who know the country from the inside.
We publish. A newsletter extends each conversation past the hour, so the reporting has somewhere to live after the stream ends.
What We're Building
These are plans with costs attached, not promises. Each one is waiting on funding.
A fellowship for African and diaspora journalists. Training and technical infrastructure, beginning in the Twin Cities, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, so that the skills and the equipment sit where the reporting happens rather than where the money usually does.
Daily Voices. A television channel carrying African and diaspora voices beyond a single weekly broadcast.
A written record. News articles drawn from the weekly interviews, published here, so that what a scholar in Conakry or a journalist in Kampala says on air becomes citable, searchable, and permanent rather than disappearing into a video archive.
African journalists are doing the work they were born to do. MORE is here to make sure the world sees it.
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