Editorial standards

1. What we are trying to do

Less than 15% of the world's published recipes are African. African Food Network exists to change that number, and to do it in a way that names the people whose cooking it is.

That gives us one editorial test that sits above all the others: does this piece make an African dish easier to cook, and does it credit the person it came from?

2. Attribution

Every recipe and article carries the name of the person who contributed it. We do not publish anonymous recipes, and we do not credit a dish to AFN when a person made it.

Where a dish came to a contributor from a named source, a grandmother, a village, a chef, a cookbook, we say so in the piece. Where AFN's editors have substantially rewritten a contribution, we say that too rather than leave someone's name on text they did not write.

Bylines use the name the contributor chose. A contributor may ask us to remove their name from a published piece at any time.

3. How a recipe gets published

Nothing appears automatically. Every submission is reviewed by a person before it goes live, and the reviewer checks four things:

• That the method works, and that quantities, timings and yields are plausible.
• That it is filed correctly: the right course, the right country of origin, the right tags. A recipe filed wrongly is a recipe nobody finds.
• That it is safe as written, particularly for meat, fish and fermentation.
• That it is the contributor's own work, and that any photograph is theirs to license.

A submission may be approved, sent back with a reason, or declined with a reason. We do not decline in silence.

4. Naming a country

Food does not respect borders, and many dishes belong to several places at once. We take this seriously because getting it wrong is not a filing error, it is a claim about whose culture something is.

So each recipe carries one primary origin, which may be a country, a region, or Pan-African where a dish genuinely belongs to the continent rather than one nation. Where a dish is shared, we say so in the text rather than picking a winner quietly. Where a name is contested, we give the alternatives.

We use the country's own preferred name.

5. Photographs

We publish photographs that AFN or the contributor owns, or that are properly licensed.

We do not publish a photograph carrying another publication's watermark, logo or credit, and we do not crop one out. Cropping a watermark does not resolve the copyright, it removes the attribution, which is worse.

Where we have no photograph for a dish, we show a placeholder rather than a picture of a different dish.

6. Where we use software, and where we do not

We use software to help organise the archive: to sort recipes into categories, to detect which country a dish comes from, to derive tags, and to check links and structure.

We do not publish machine-written recipes or machine-written food writing under a contributor's name. A recipe on AFN was cooked by a person, and the words describing it were written by a person or edited by one.

Where AFN publishes anything substantially produced by software, we will label it plainly.

7. Money and independence

Sponsored content, paid partnerships and advertising are labelled as such, clearly and at the top, not in small print at the end.

Sponsors do not choose which recipes we publish, do not see editorial before publication, and do not have approval over it. Where AFN's events business has a commercial relationship with someone we are also writing about, we disclose it in the piece.

8. Corrections

We correct things, and we say that we have.

If you find an error, write to info@afrifoodnetwork.com. We aim to respond within five working days.

• A factual error is corrected and a dated correction note is added to the piece.
• A significant error affecting the substance of a recipe is corrected, noted, and the contributor is told.
• A typographical fix is made silently.

We do not delete a piece to make an error disappear. Where something must come down, the address keeps working and explains what happened.

9. Complaints and right of reply

If we have written about you or your business and you believe we have been unfair or inaccurate, write to info@afrifoodnetwork.com with the detail. We will look at it properly, respond, and where we are wrong we will correct it and say so.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may ask for it to be reviewed by AFN's editorial lead, whose decision is final within AFN.