Volunteer Guest Booker The Africa Desk Live | Remote | About 4 to 6 hours a week

About us

The Africa Desk Live is a weekly two-hour live public affairs program about Africa and the African diaspora. It is produced by the Media Organization for Representation and Empowerment (MORE), a Minnesota 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

We are working through a series called 54 Conversations, one episode for each African country. We are currently at Episode 17. Every episode is free to watch, stays online permanently, and has no paywall or subscription. In a single week this year, the program reached viewers in about 30 countries.

We are small. Very small. That is the honest context for this role.

The problem you would be solving

Every week we need two to four guests, usually from a specific country, usually with a short notice window, and usually across several time zones. Right now, one person does all of that alongside hosting, producing, writing, and running the organization.

Most invitations are never answered. Some countries are much harder than others. The work is research, careful writing, patient follow-up, and tracking who said what and when. It is the single biggest constraint on the program, and the one thing another pair of hands would genuinely fix.

What you would actually do

Research and build a shortlist of potential guests for upcoming episodes, with a short note on why each one fits.

Find contact details, which is often the hardest and most valuable part.

Draft invitation emails from our template and send follow-ups on a schedule.

Keep the guest tracker current, so we always know who was asked, when, and what they said.

Collect what a confirmed guest owes us: an email address, a photograph, and the exact title they want read aloud.

You would not book anyone on your own authority, write editorial content, or appear on air unless you wanted to.

Who this suits

Someone organized and persistent who does not take silence personally. Clear, warm written English. Comfortable with a spreadsheet and an email inbox. Interested in Africa, journalism, or both.

Useful but not required: a background in research, recruiting, communications, academia, or media production. Knowledge of a particular region or language. Experience of the African diaspora, from any direction.

You do not need to be in Minnesota. You do not need to be African. You do need to be reliable, because a guest who is chased once and then forgotten is worse than a guest who was never asked.

Commitment and what we offer

About 4 to 6 hours a week, arranged entirely around your own schedule. We would ask for an initial commitment of 3 months so that it is worth both of us learning the work.

This is an unpaid volunteer role. In exchange, we offer a real credit on a broadcast that is genuinely watched, a reference from the executive director, a say in who appears on the program, and the specific satisfaction of watching someone you found say something on air that nobody else was asking them.

How to apply

Send a short note to

president@moremediaempowerment.org telling us who you are and why you're

interested. Attach a CV if you have one to hand, though a good paragraph

matters more to us than a formatted document.

One optional thing that would help enormously. Pick any African country, name one person you think we should interview about it, and say in three sentences why. That tells us more than any CV will.