The African Centre for Media Excellence is conducting a series of training workshops for Ugandan journalists on numeracy, “Numbers and the News.” The series of one-day and half-day workshops, fully funded by the Washington-based non-profit, Population Reference Bureau (PRB), are meant for editors and journalists who report on business, development issues such as health, education, as well as politics and governance.

Reporting about numbers remains a major challenge in Ugandan newsrooms. This is not a peculiarly Ugandan problem. The challenge of numeracy in the newsroom has been well documented. Writing about this veteran American journalist Jack Hart once said: “In the grand scheme of things, most journalists rank numbers somewhere below cockroaches. If the truth be told, a good number of us chose journalism as a college major because it allowed us to avoid math courses.”

Whatever the causes of the problem, our news media commit “crimes of numbers” almost on a daily basis. The categories of the “crimes” vary from computing percentages wrongly, presenting wrong conversions, through getting multiplications or divisions wrong. Some journalists get the numbers right, but the reader would require a Ph.D in economics or statistics to make sense of them. Their writing is simply not accessible and is often devoid of context. Others avoid numbers altogether, making it difficult for their audiences to make comparisons or understand claims, for instance, of increases or decreases in all manner of areas.

Journalists can’t simply give up on numbers. They can’t run away from numbers. Much of what they report is based on numbers. Election results, government budgets, corruption scandals, economic forecasts, environmental degradation forecasts, population growth, unemployment figures, food shortages, oil prices, name it. The news is full of numbers. Through newsroom and  workshop-based training, journalists can improve their skills in reporting about numbers.

The training covers the following areas:
• A mathematics competence test
• A review of the use of numbers on different media platforms
• Some basic math/statistical concepts [Percentages, percentiles, means, medians, ratios, fractions,
cross tabulations, graphs and charts, etc]
• Conceptualising stories based on numbers
• Writing with and about numbers