Daily Trust’s Vanessa Offiong wins fellowship

Adie Vanessa Offiong, an editor with Daily Trust newspaper, has won the Health Systems Global (HSG) Media Fellowship.

She is one of seven candidates from across the globe who have been considered for the intensive training on reporting governments’ modern health policies and the health challenges facing developing countries.

Offiong, the only Nigerian who won the fellowship will be joining other journalists from six countries – India, Russia, Namibia, Costa Rica and Australia.

The organisers of the fellowship, in a statement announcing the winners, said the successful journalists had been selected as the first HSG Media Fellows ahead of the Fifth Global Symposium for Health Systems Research (HSR2018) in Liverpool, United Kingdom, come October.

The statement said, “The HSG Media Fellows will be undertaking cutting-edge investigations on critical health systems and health policy topics in diverse contexts and settings ahead of HSR2018. The idea is to promote high quality and diverse journalistic practices that address critical health systems and health policy related topics.

“At the heart of HSG is to advocate and raise the profile of health systems and health policy issues from different countries and regions, and globally. HSG recognizes the vital role that media play in presenting the bigger and complex picture of health challenges and the need to strengthen health systems to address them. The fellows will be working hard to communicate and engage around these complex realities.”

Offiong who is head of the Daily Trust Arts & Entertainment desk has an interest in reporting development issues with a human angle and solutions-based approach.

She uses data in reporting a range of topics including health, women & children, environment and agriculture among others and has done this for about a decade.

She is a 2017 IHP intern of the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp, Belgium. Offiong is also a 2017 Fellow of the ICFJ-United Nations Foundation Reporting Fellowship on Climate and Migration in which her story ‘When antenatal is luxury: the IDP story’ won in the ‘Honorary Mention’ category of the competition for its impact.