African Media Initiative, AMI, Appoints Eric Chinje as Chief Executive Officer

    Senior Advisor at the African Media Initiative (AMI), Eric Chinje, will take on a prestigious assignment as Chief Executive Officer, beginning July 1, 2014, the organization has announced. The African Media Initiative (AMI) is a pan-African organisation that seeks to strengthen the continent’s private and independent media sector from an owner and operator perspective to promote democratic governance, social development and economic growth. AMI’s overall goal is to promote the development of pluralistic media as a necessary and critical ingredient of democratic governance, as well as economic and human development in Africa. While serving in this new post, Chinje will continue his role as Senior Advisor to KRL,contributing high-level strategic communications advice to public and private sector clients. From his base in Nairobi, he will be able to provide real-time, on-the-ground support to KRL clients in the region. Eric’s new position will give KRL a full-time presence on the ground in East Africa and further enhance the firm’s strategic communications capacities. Eric Chinje came to KRL after serving as the Director of Strategic Communications at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. He spent over 16 years at the World Bank in Washington, DC and held senior management positions, including leading the Global Media Development Program at the World Bank Institute (WBI) and as Manager of the Africa Region Strategic Communications (AFRSC) Unit where he oversaw a team of over 80 communication professionals located across Sub-Saharan Africa. He was the Bank’s Spokesperson on African affairs. Keenly interested in the issues of governance, Eric’s signature achievement was the launch of the Independent Media for Accountability, Governance and Empowerment (IMAGE) program that ran a series of journalism capacity-building workshops on Economics and Business Reporting, Investigative Journalism, Covering the Budget, Reporting on Agriculture and others, reaching over 2000 journalists in Africa and Asia.