The Policy Desk.
Where we defend the conditions a story needs to exist.
Some stories are shaped long before anyone picks up a camera - by the rules that decide who may tell them, in which language, and on whose terms.
This is where we turn our attention to those rules.
Our compass has always been curiosity. Our first tool has always been listening.
Sometimes, listening closely enough to a person and their work reveals that the obstacle is not the story at all. It is a rule standing between a person and their right to tell it - a licence, a clause, a window too narrow to speak into.
The Policy Desk is where that attention becomes something with a paper trail: a submission, a brief, an argument placed on the record. We do for the law what we do for a story - approach it with patience, read it closely, and refuse to accept the surface as the whole of it.
We come to policy the way we come to every story: From the inside.
We aren’t lawyers, nor do we pretend to be. We’re the people the law governs - photographers, filmmakers, writers, and the community-based practitioners we train to document their own lives. When a Bill decides how a film may be made, or who is consulted before a law is passed, it’s deciding the terms of our own work and theirs.
The constitutional argument, that belongs to the lawyers.
The sector's balance sheet, that belongs to the economists.
But the lived, specific reality of what a law does to the work of documenting African life from inside African communities? That’s the account we can offer that few others can.
How this works.
-
We defer on law and we hold on practice. "We are not lawyers, and here is what this clause does to our work" is the most honest thing we can say, and often the most useful thing a committee will hear.
-
The Act itself, the Bill as gazetted, the policy as exists, the judgment as delivered. We check what a law or policy actually says before we say what it does, and we cite it so you can check us.
-
We publish our corrections. We name the questions we can’t yet answer. When we alter or sharpen a position, we say what changed and why.
-
We do not turn the people we document into evidence of their own deficit. Communities are agents in our work, never illustrations of a problem. That commitment does not soften when the work becomes a submission.
What we interrogate.
Full disclosure.
We're a storytelling practice, not a law firm. What we place here is a practitioner's position, not legal advice. We speak for our own practice and for the makers we train and work with - not for the whole sector, but in practice from within the sector.
We do this because the laws that govern how Kenyans tell their own stories should be shaped by - or at least in partnership with - the people who tell them.