Justin Arenstein is an award-winning journalist and media strategist who works with partners across Africa to help strengthen investigative reporting, while also helping civic watchdogs adopt new technologies and build stronger business models. This includes managing the continent’s largest civic technology network, Code for Africa (CfA), and Africa’s largest investigative technology lab, ANCIR, along with a series of Sandbox Funds for digital experiments in newsrooms or social justice organisations.

Arenstein is a start-up junky. Beginning as an anti-corruption investigative journalist in South Africa, he launched the nation’s first rural social justice wire-service, African Eye News Service (AENS), before helping pioneer the region’s first rural lifestyle magazine publisher (HomeGrown Magazines) and Mpumalanga’s first commercial radio station (MPowerFM).

He is also currently a digital strategist, as a Knight International Fellow, for the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in Washington DC, where he advises on leapfrog technologies for watchdog media. Outside of ICFJ work, Arenstein advises Google on data-driven journalism and digital newsroom strategies in Africa.