Catherine Gicheru

Catherine Gicheru is an International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) Knight Fellow currently spearheading a project that drives coverage of underreported gender, health and development issues affecting marginalized groups. That initiative, the Africa Women Journalism Project (AWJP)​, also works to strengthening the voices of women journalists by helping them to become innovators in their newsrooms. As the driving force behind the AWJP, Gicheru leads a team of journalists, mentors and data analysts in five African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda) who are producing smart, data-based storytelling with a special focus on COVID-19.

A veteran journalist with two of the leading media organisations in the region – she was the first woman bureau chief, the first female news editor of the Nation Media Group and was the founding editor of the dally newspaper the ​Star​. She co-founded East Africa’s first budget and public finance fact checking and verification initiative, ​PesaCheck.​ She is a member of the Media Development Investment Fund’s board of directors, is an advisory board member of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Oxford; the Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications; the IWMF Online Harassment Board, the British Council’s First News Worldwide program and advised on Open Society’s Fiscal Governance Program and the ICFJ’s State of Technology in Global Newsrooms survey. She is a jury member for WAN-IFRA Africa Digital Media Awards, EJC’s MoneyTrail among others.

Gicheru is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, a Reuters Institute Journalism Fellow at Oxford University, and a 1992 IWMF Courage in Journalism award winner.