Catherine is an ICFJ Knight Fellow. She is the founding editor of the Star newspaper in Nairobi. she is also the first female news editor at the Nation Media Group, the largest and most influential media group in East Africa. She is a recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Award and was named by New African magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans of 2018.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, she founded the Africa Women Journalism Project (AWJP). The project brings together female journalists and data analysts to produce data-driven coverage of underreported health, gender and economic issues. Gicheru leads a team of editors, mentors, data specialists and designers who work with women journalists in eight countries — Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa and Senegal.
Earlier in her Knight fellowship, Catherine Gicheru led a panAfrican women’s data journalism network, WanaData (“daughters of data” in Swahili), a project developed in a partnership between ICFJ and Code for Africa, one of Africa’s premier organizations promoting digital journalism.
She is co-founder of Kenya’s first fact-checking news site, PesaCheck. She has kept up the fight against mis- and dis-information by sharing effective techniques across the Sub-Saharan region.
Catherine is a member of the board of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and also serves on the board of directors of the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF). She is also a member of the advisory committee of the recently launched Nigeria Media Innovation Program.
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.
