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Sahelien.com's future

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Sahelien.com is a bilingual French/English news website founded and run by Malian journalist Abdoulsalam Hama, American journalist Joe Penney, and American web developer Sam Royston.  We are supported by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) and Groupe Klédu.

The website is based in Bamako, Mali, and it covers Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Abdoulsalam Hama is a journalist from Gao, northern Mali, and Joe Penney is a journalist who has covered West Africa for the past seven years, while Sam Royston developed the site from New York City. Sahelien.com has full-time correspondents in Bamako, Gao, Timbuktu, Kidal, Niamey, Agadez, Arlit, Zinder, Diffa and Ouagadougou, as well as a network of part-time journalists throughout the three countries.

These journalists are from the regions that they cover, and are often the only ones doing on the ground reporting in their regions. Sahelien.com is not only providing news but also contributing to the development of robust local media in West Africa.

The original role of Sahelien.com envisioned by its founders was twofold: one, to fill an information gap in the Sahel region, where events have major impacts on both West Africa and abroad but where credible information is extremely hard to come by, and two, to help transfer control over information flow and the perception of news events in the Sahel from foreigners to people from the region. Today, Sahelien.com plays an important role in holding governments and international actors in the region accountable.

In the past year, we have published reports that have sent ripples across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Our revelation of the cardinal of Mali’s Swiss bank account provoked a major scandal, while our reports on migration from Mali’s Kayes region “Koniakary se construit avec l’aide des migrants” and “Kayes, le don de la migration,” inspired similar reports in RFI. We produced our first short documentary on Malian history, describing a manuscript written by El Hadj Umar Tall to negotiate peace between Borno and Sokoto. This was the first time since the political crisis in 2012 that a media looked to the Timbuktu manuscripts for lessons for the peace process.

We reported on dozens of attacks in the region, including the attack on the Istanbul restaurant in Ouagadougou. We published an op-ed in the New York Times and were the first to report on the migrants dying in the Sahara. Thanks to our efforts to innovate online media in the region, we have been selected from a pool of more than 80 to participate in CFI’s inaugural NAILA training program.

Since its inception in 2012, we have always kept our content free of charge. We are asking for support from our readers to keep it that way. We want to raise $15,000 to support our newsgathering operations and continue to provide timely, reliable news and analysis to viewers across the world.

We are extremely grateful for your support! We look forward to growing with our community of readers and viewers, and supporting each other.

Organizer

Sahelien Pointcom
Organizer
Brooklyn, NY

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