Featuring Ms. Zaina Adamu, an award-winning global communications expert with over 10 years of experience working in media and international affairs, with an emphasis in human rights and foreign policy. In 2018, she founded Ghana Girl Rising, a social enterprise aimed at improving education access for Ghana’s marginalized young women. Before then, she was a journalist at CNN, covering both the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

During her six-year tenure at CNN, she won a Peabody award for her contribution to the network’s reporting of the Arab Spring and was selected as a Power 30 Under 30 honoree. As news editor for The Spokesman, she won an Excellence Award for her breaking news coverage of President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 win.

Zaina is the author of 20,000 Words: A Guide to Finding Calm in a Cluttered World. She currently serves on the Board of Harvard W3D: Women in Defense, Diplomacy, and Development, the Harvard Alumni for Global Development, and G-100, an influential group of 100 women leaders from across the world.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism from Morgan State University and a Master’s degree in International Education Policy from Harvard.

You can read more about Ghana Girl Rising at www.ghanagirlrising.com. It is a social enterprise connecting underprivileged young women with resources to access a formal education. Through scholarships, tuition assistance, leadership development and public service engagement, the organization aims to inform, educate and galvanize change among its participants.