Draft:Simi Jolaoso

Simi Jolaoso is a British broadcast journalist at the BBC. She reports for BBC News and has presented BBC What's New and BBC Minute. Jolaoso previously worked for ITV News.

Early life and education
Simisola Jolaoso, was born in Edmonton, north London to Nigerian parents. She attended St. John and St. James' Church of England Primary School. At the age of 10, Jolaoso moved to Senegal, where she lived with her mother for three months, before moving to Nigeria in 2002. She attended Dansol High School. In 2005, Jolaoso moved to Pretoria, South Africa. She went to St. Mary's Diocese School for Girls and did her IGCSEs and A-Levels at British International College.

Jolaoso studied at the University of Pretoria where she did a BA in Modern European Languages, focusing on English Literature, French and Spanish; and a BA(Hons) in Journalism. Her cohort received the Best Research Output Award at Honours Level for their Newspaper project called Mamelodi Voice.

Career
In 2013, Jolaoso moved back to London and got a job at MTV. She worked on the TV show MTV Shuga.

In 2015, she studied a Masters in Television Journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London, graduating with a first class.

She won an Amnesty International Media Award and a Broadcast Journalist Training Council Award in 2018 for her documentary Forensic Nurses: Fighting Sex Crimes in South Africa. It was praised for its “moving insight” and “strong storytelling”. The documentary was shown at London's Curzon Bloomsbury cinema, Southampton Film Week and at the S.O.U.L Fest film festival. It was also turned into an article for The Guardian. Jolaoso made the documentary as a One World Media Fellow.

In 2022, she was a presenter and judge at the Amnesty International Media Awards.

Jolaoso worked as a production journalist at ITV regional news in Carlisle and Bristol. In 2019, she joined ITV National News as an Output Producer, before leaving to join the BBC in September of that year.

Jolaoso was a TV reporter with BBC South West until June 2020, before she joined the BBC World Service as a presenter on the programme BBC Minute. She has done digital videos and articles for BBC News, including a piece on Britain's first black female TV presenter Barbara Blake Hannah.

In January 2022, Jolaoso joined the show BBC What's New, on BBC Africa, where she presented, reported and produced on various topics about the continent. She interviewed several Afrobeats artists and African celebrities including Fireboy DML, Asa, Gyakie, Oxlade, Swanky Jerry and Temi Otedola.

One of her most notable interviews was with Sonia Ekweremadu, the daughter of the Former Deputy President of the Senate of Nigeria, Ike Ekweremadu, who was imprisoned for nine years and eight months at the Old Bailey for conspiring to arrange the travel of a man for the purpose of harvesting his organs.

Jolaoso covered the 2023 Nigerian elections for the BBC and in 2024 filled in the role of Africa Correspondent, based in Lagos. There she provided the only continuous international coverage of Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's visit to West Africa and first visit to Nigeria.

Personal life
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Jolaoso shared her experiences with racism in the media industry.

In February 2021, Jolaoso purchased her first property.