User:MwalimuW/sandbox

Catherine Gicheru is a pioneering, award-winning journalist from Kenya and an ardent advocate of the use of digital technologies in the media profession.

Catherine broke ground as the first woman bureau chief and news editor at the Daily Nation (https://www.nation.co.ke/) owned by Kenya’s leading media house, the Nation Media Group. She also served as the founding editor at The Star (https://www.the-star.co.ke/), a tabloid newspaper belonging to Radio Africa Group (https://www.opensocietyfoundationas.org/people/catherine-gicheru).

She would then move on to serve as the first country lead for Code for Kenya. This is a civic technology initiative aimed at enabling citizens and mass media to use technologies to stay informed and to keep governments accountable (hhttps://codeforkenya.org/).

She has mentored scores of journalists and engaged in investigative journalism projects. The latter include exposes about extrajudicial killings, the Kenyan banking sector’s collapse in the 1990s, criminal gangs, corruption, and terrorism. She has since promoted the training of journalists in new initiatives such as fact-checking and data visualization, and has been integral in the development of applications such as PesaCheck (https://pesacheck.org/) and The Biscuit Index (https://biscuitindex.codeforkenya.org/).

The former is a fact-checking initiative aimed at verifying numerical and statistical information from across East Africa. Projects include the rise in food prices in Tanzania, the informal sector’s contributions to the Kenyan and Ugandan economies, and health care information. The Biscuit Index enables citizens to gauge the amount of money Kenyan county governments spend on hospitality (which Code for Kenya terms ‘tea and biscuits’) against costs that are common to the average person, such as monthly rent, school tuition fees, and maize flour (a staple food).

Catherine has provided consultancy services to a range of organzations including the African Centre for Strategic Studies, the Media Council of Kenya, and the Editors Guild in Kenya, among others. She is also a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, a Reuters Institute Journalism Fellow at Oxford University, and International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ) Fellow (https://www.opensocietyfoundationas.org/people/catherine-gicheru). Catherine received the 1992 IWMF Courage in Journalism award.