Moky Makura (Africa No Filter) - Templates of storytelling and narratives | Media in Africa #2

A DRC bond issue four times oversubscribed, not because investors believed in the country but because the risk priced into it paid so well. A thousand people in the US and the UK who would buy a painting from Africa, but not a computer and not a medicine. And a bill, $4.2 billion, for what the world's coverage adds to the continent's cost of borrowing. In the second episode of Media in Africa, Georja Calvin-Smith talks with Moky Makura, Executive Director of Africa No Filter, the narrative-change organisation she has led since it launched six years ago, about what the story of a broken continent actually costs, and who benefits from keeping it in place. Drawing on Africa No Filter's own research, from the Global Media Index to a study of stereotypes run with the University of Bath, Moky maps the landscape: why the risk premium survives even where the data does not support it, how a four-times oversubscribed bond can be bad news, where the big American titles rank against the Guardian on African coverage, what a thousand consumers in the US and UK will and will not buy from the continent, why her not-for-profit news agency Bird gives its journalism away, and how the same protest becomes either chaos or agency depending on who you cast as the hero. Plus, as every episode: Moky's nerd fact, which involves collapsing DIY shelves and a saved Instagram album of cleaning videos. Media in Africa is a ten-part podcast by Meridian17, a Dutch-South African think and do tank, produced in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Media Programme Sub-Saharan Africa. New episodes weekly. Full video episodes: www.youtube.com/@meridian17org All platforms and more: meridian17.org/podcast Follow @meridian17org on Instagram and TikTok. © 2026 Meridian17 NPC. All rights reserved.