Media Organization for Representation and Empowerment (MORE)

MORE exists so African journalists can practice excellence in journalism from where they stand, without leaving home, and be taken seriously.

We do that in two ways. We train reporters and equip newsrooms, beginning in Liberia and Sierra Leone, with the skills and the 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.

MORE, the Media Organization for Representation and Empowerment, is a Minnesota nonprofit and a registered 501(c)(3) charitable organization. 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, not just quoted.

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 may 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, and we turn to the diaspora instead. That is not a compromise we are comfortable with. 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 still drives the whole organization: when the story isn't 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, 72,000 viewers watched the program. The audience has grown by more than 9,000 followers in three months, with no marketing budget and no paid promotion.

Nineteen episodes. Nineteen countries. Thirty-five to go.