This issue of Modern Woman Magazine spotlights Stephanie Busari, an International Journalist who oversees CNN Africa based in Lagos.
She was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of African descent in 2017 by the United Nations and one of the 25 most powerful female journalists in Africa in 2020. She was also selected as a Yale World Fellow.
She moved back in July 2016 to pioneer and head CNN’s first digital and multiplatform bureau. She reports on-air for CNN International and last year led the network’s 2019 Nigeria presidential election coverage.
Stephanie heads CNN Africa’s digital editorial and operational strategy that crafts a new narrative for African storytelling and establishing the next generation of African storytellers as continent’s change and tastemakers.
She has won multiple awards in her 20-year career and in April 2016 exclusively obtained the ‘proof of life’ video that showed that the missing Chibok schoolgirls were still alive. This video flagged off negotiation that led to the eventual release of more than 100 of the schoolgirls.
Busari won a Gracie Award in 2017 for her persistence in covering this story and the previous recipient of the Outstanding Woman in the Media Awards. She was part of the CNN team that won a Peabody Award in May 2015 for the network’s coverage of the missing Nigerian schoolgirls.
In 2018, Stephanie and her team secured an interview with a whistleblower student who recorded her professor demanding sex in exchange for "better" grades. Following CNN’s reporting, the professor was sacked by his university, and Nigeria’s senate launched an investigation. The lecturer was also prosecuted leading to a rare conviction of a lecturer harassing his student for sex. Stephanie worked on Nigeria’s #MeToo stories, helping Nigerian women name their abusers and speak on the rape.
A public speaker, Stephanie shares her insights and moderate panels; She is the founder of TEDxBrixton and has spoken at TEDGlobal, UN Women, and Said Business School, Oxford, among many others.
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