Author: Gemma Gatticchi
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Famine looms in Southern Africa: El Niño-driven drought has caused maize shortages
In Southern Africa, maize makes up about 20% of the average diet, consumed as pap, sadza and nshima. The recent decline in production across the region because of the dry and hot weather caused by El Niño is having devastating implications for the people who live in the region. Three countries have already declared a…
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32 of South Africa’s prisoners are children
The number of young inmates in South Africa’s prisons – those under the age of 18 – has dropped by about 83% since 2015/16, according to data from the department of correctional services. In August 2022, the age of criminal capacity was raised from 10 years of age to 12. The Child Justice Act means…
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School trip: Walking is the only option for two-thirds of SA’s learners
There are about 15.4-million school-going children in South Africa and almost two-thirds of them have to walk to school every day, according Statistics SA’s 2023 General Household Survey. Walking to school is not necessarily a bad thing but for many learners there are few alternatives. There is little in the way of school buses available to learners and public transport is equally limited…
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Despite rising crime rate, SA has dire shortage of forensic experts
South Africa should ideally have 330 forensic pathologists, an expert says. Instead there are only about 50 working in the public sector.
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Hands-on: 5 reasons to switch to OpenRefine to clean data
It has a pretty steep learning curve but it’s definitely worth the effort to learn OpenRefine if you need to clean large amounts of very messy data.
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How we create custom charts using Flourish and Figma
At The Outlier we publish a lot of static graphics and we like to apply our own styles. Here’s how we do it using Flourish and Figma.
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Simple guide to scraping data from PDFs
Papers, PDFs and poorly scanned documents are the way most data journalism projects begin. But instead of typing up a new spreadsheet, here’s how to use Adobe Acrobat DC to do all the hard work for you.