Financial Transparency Coalition

The Thomson Reuters Foundation is partnering with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) to hold workshops for journalists in African countries to improve their expertise in financial journalism (Full Disclosure: Norad is also a major financial supporter of the Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development).  The sessions will have a specific focus on how to track illicit financial flows out of the developing world.

From Thomson Reuters:

About 100 journalists, spread over eight courses in different African locations in the course of the next year, will receive intensive training to hone their financial reporting and analytical skills.

It is the first time the Thomson Reuters Foundation has teamed up directly with a national development aid agency to deliver this kind of training, although it has previously worked with multilateral organisations and local partners to run courses aimed at strengthening financial journalism in Africa.

The article continues:

A special angle in this new series of workshops is the issue of money being illicitly siphoned out of poor countries, often into tax havens. By its nature this is a highly sensitive topic, and a challenge for journalists to uncover.

The first 2 courses will be offered in Dakar (Nov 29-Dec 3, 2010) and Nairobi (Dec 6-10, 2010).

You can apply for the Dakar course here and the Nairobi course here.