Roxanne Joseph is a data journalist from Cape Town, South Africa.
As an associate of Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism, she investigates digitally-enabled wildlife trafficking in Africa and Europe. She is working on the #WildEye wildlife crime mapping tool in partnership with the Earth Journalism Network and the Digital Dangers project in partnership with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime.
She also writes 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.
Currently, she is working with the same team to investigative what happened leading up to the most recent drought in South Africa. In 2018, she won a regional Vodacom Journalism award in the data category for her work on this team.
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. As a result of this, many in the journalism community argued that 'she broke the core ethics of journalism including accountability, transparency and truth-telling'. For this reason, Wits University journalism department removed her from the programme of the African Investigative Journalism Conference 2019.
Journalismfund.eu was not aware of these allegations when we awarded her team a grant in November 2018. As for the Journalismfund.eu-supported investigation that Roxanne and her team had done, we've been assured by Oxpeckers that Roxanne 'produced an impressive body of work for the unit, and has consistently acted in a professional manner.'
