The facilitator engages participants during the training session at Baraza Media Industrial Area.
In an era where the speed of information often outpaces verification, Kenya’s media ecosystem faces a critical challenge. By the time an election arrives, public trust is already shaped by pre-existing narratives and platform dynamics. To ensure that Kenyan journalists and digital creators are ready to meet these demands, the Creator’s Lab, a collaboration between Baraza Media Lab and the ThomsonReuters Foundation, has been launched in anticipation of the 2027 electoral cycle.
The urgency behind this work is rooted in a structural shift that Baraza Media Lab’s own research has been tracking. Information integrity in Kenya is no longer solely a newsroom responsibility. Recent findings from Baraza Media Lab, show that digital creators and influencers now make up the largest single share of the country’s civic storytellers, ahead of traditional journalists, hybrid practitioners, and media entrepreneurs combined. Roughly three-quarters of the respondents say algorithms and moderation systems shape how often their civic content is even seen. Attention, visibility, reach, income, and behavior are now filtered through platform algorithms as much as through editorial judgment, and creators feel it directly.
That shift has consequences for money as much as for message. A little over a third of creators self-fund their civic storytelling entirely, while more than half depend on media-related work as their primary income. Every civic post, in other words, is also a small economic gamble.
Participants gathered for the training session in Baraza Media Lab Industrial Area.
What Kenya’s Influencers Have Already Lived Through
A companion Baraza Media Lab study, The Complicated Role of Influencers in the 2024/2025 Kenyan Civic Movement, offers a ground-level view of exactly what that gamble looks like. Drawing on a survey of Kenyan influencers and a focus group spanning advocacy, lifestyle, comedy, media, and law, the report tracked how creators navigated the 2024 Femicide March and the 2024/2025 Finance Bill protests.
The picture is one of silent negotiations under pressure. The large majority of influencers supported the movements, yet participation split into three recognisable styles: activists who posted, marched, and live streamed; strategic observers who weighed timing and wording carefully; and silent creators who chose not to post at all, only to discover that silence itself was read as a political statement.
Audiences overwhelmingly expected creators to speak up, and treated quiet as complicity rather than neutrality. A meaningful share of followers said they had unfollowed someone over it. Meanwhile, over half of surveyed influencers reported losing income as brands paused campaigns or withdrew over a creator’s stance, and many described harassment, burnout, and the anxiety of wondering whether the next post would cost them their livelihood. As one influencer put it, reflecting on the impossible math of the moment: “Either way, silence is not neutral.”
The toll was not evenly distributed. Baraza’s broader trust research confirms the same gendered pattern the influencer study surfaced: women are more than three times as likely as men to self-censor because of online threats, and face targeted harassment that shapes who feels safe enough to participate in civic conversation at all.
Participants engage in a group discussion during the training session at Baraza Media Lab, Industrial area.
Two Communities, One Set of Questions
It’s against this backdrop that the Creator’s Lab took shape. The program began with a structured two-day training experience and concluded with a community salon. Journalists accustomed to editorial rigour and creators skilled in audience engagement were paired to examine the core questions they share: What can I trust? What should I publish? How do I provide context and maintain credibility?
This pairing was informed by Baraza’s research that explored how journalists and creators were bringing complementary, not competing, strengths to the same civic information system. Journalists carry institutional assets, editorial oversight, structured verification protocols, legal review, and institutional accountability. Creators carry relational audience trust built through daily authenticity, platform fluency, and the ability to translate complex issues into language young Kenyans actually engage with. As one journalist during the research study summarised it: “Journalists carry facts… but creators have a relationship with people.” By bringing these two communities together, the Lab demonstrated that high-quality storytelling is not a single discipline but a synthesis of verification, creative presentation, and sustained community dialogue.
Facilitator takes trainees through a presentation during the training session at Baraza Media Lab Kisumu.
Verification and Trust
Journalists brought strict fact-checking procedures, while creators shared tools for rapid visual fact-verification and audience-centric storytelling. Together, they explored how to embed factual integrity into dynamic formats that resonate with diverse Kenyan audiences. This mirrors a gap identified nationally, where most storytellers have solid baseline habits like cross-checking sources, consulting fact-checkers and subject-matter experts, but far fewer feel confident with more technical tools like reverse image and video search, geolocation techniques, or AI-assisted verification. Closing that confidence gap, rather than teaching verification from scratch, was a real focus of the Lab’s sessions.
Two participants discuss ideas during the training session at Baraza Media Lab Kisumu.
Online Safety and Audience Growth
The Lab addressed best practices for protecting sources and amplifying authentic voices. Participants tracked audience habits across multiple platforms to align content delivery with consumer behaviour without compromising editorial independence, which is a balancing act made more urgent by how many storytellers already report avoiding, removing, or self-censoring content purely out of safety concerns.
Sustainable Income and Legal Awareness
The sessions also covered how to generate reliable revenue streams through native advertising, subscription models, or micro-payments, while ensuring all content meets legal and ethical standards. For a media economy where a large share of creators are still self-funding civic work out of pocket, this was central to whether any of these practices are sustainable past a single election cycle.
From Isolated Workshops to Connected Infrastructure
The culmination of the Lab was a community salon where participants reflected on artivism and community voice, enabling dialogue on ethical storytelling and how Kenya’s budding content creators shape public perception. This reflects a broader operational shift Baraza’s research calls for: moving away from one-off training workshops and toward sustained collaborative reporting, creator residencies, peer networks, and joint storytelling —the connective tissue that turns individual skills into shared infrastructure. Trust infrastructure, in this framing, is built in layers: skilled people, consistent verification practices, cross-sector relationships, resilient institutions, and transparent platform systems, each reinforcing the others.
Participants engaging with a facilitator during a presentation at Baraza Media Lab Kisumu.
Looking Beyond 2027
The Creator’s Lab is less about teaching a single skill set and more about fostering a network where journalism’s rigour and digital storytelling’s innovation coexist. The ambition extends well past the next ballot. The programme’s long-term goal is a Kenyan information ecosystem where civic storytelling, regardless of platform or format, is grounded in editorial independence, factual accuracy, and genuine accountability, where creators and journalists function as complementary actors rather than competing silos that hostile actors can exploit, and where young Kenyans, who dominate both the creator community and the voting population, are equipped as producers and consumers of trustworthy civic information.
Just as importantly, the frameworks, curricula, networks, and institutional knowledge built now are meant to inform future civic media work across East Africa, and give storytellers the legal, digital, and psychological protections they need to report safely during elections without compromising their independence or their wellbeing. The physical and human infrastructure this programme builds is designed to survive election cycles, laying groundwork not just for 2027, but for 2032 and beyond.
By investing in this intersection now, Kenya positions itself to navigate the complex information terrain of future elections and to build a resilient, citizen-centric media landscape that thrives well beyond 2027.