Roxanne Joseph is an Open Data advocate from Cape Town, South Africa.
As an associate of Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism, she heads up the Oxpeckers Academy, training journalists, academics and conservationists from across the globe. She has been working with Oxpeckers since 2018, inter alia managing their environmental crime programme and digital tool #WildEye, and the renewable energy programme, #PowerTracker.
She has also written about corruption in the South African public sector and was part of the award-winning transnational investigation into lotteries around the world, Gaming the Lottery.
In 2018, she won a regional Vodacom Journalism award in the data category for her work on this team.
She graduated from Wits University with an honours degree in journalism and media studies.
Her writing has been published in Huffington Post, the Sunday Times, Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism, Al Jazeera, The Guardian and other, locally-based publications.
Controversy
On 20 September 2019, it came to our attention that Roxanne Joseph had lied about having cancer in 2015 and 2016. Many in the journalism community argued that she had broken the core ethics of journalism, including accountability, transparency, and truth-telling. For this reason, the journalism department at Wits University removed her from the programme for the 2019 African Investigative Journalism Conference.
Journalismfund was unaware of these allegations when we awarded her team a grant in November 2018. Regarding the investigation supported by Journalismfund that Roxanne and her team conducted, we have been assured by Oxpeckers that Roxanne 'produced an impressive body of work for the unit, and has consistently acted professionally.'
