By Alis Bownds
Former Report for the World journalist Chiamaka Okafor reflects on building Nigeria’s first diaspora reporting desk at Premium Times and why her work now focuses on equipping young people with the media literacy skills needed to navigate misinformation and power in the digital age.
Alis Bownds: Let’s start with your experience at Report for the World. How did you come into that role, and what did it mean for your career?
Chiamaka Okafor: Report for the World provided an opportunity for me to become. And I say that very intentionally. The program supports newsrooms that may not have the resources to fund specialised reporting by paying journalists’ salaries and enabling them to cover underreported beats. That’s how I joined Premium Times, one of Nigeria’s foremost investigative news platforms, to report on foreign affairs, specifically diaspora issues.
Before that, I had reported across many beats: politics, health, gender, and human rights. But diaspora reporting was different. At the time, there were very few journalists in Nigeria focusing specifically on diaspora issues. Many reported on foreign policy, but not on Nigerians living abroad and how global events affected them. Report for the World gave me the space to carve out that niche.
Alis: And you didn’t just report, you helped build something new.
Chiamaka: Exactly. It was the first time a dedicated diaspora desk was created at Premium Times. That meant building it from scratch: shaping the strategy, cultivating sources across continents, and figuring out how to make those stories relevant to audiences at home. In the newsroom, it became an inside joke. People stopped calling me Chiamaka and started calling me “Mama Diaspora” or “Madam Diaspora.” I lost my name for a while, but it showed the impact of the work.
What fulfilled me most was seeing the readership grow, not just in Nigeria, but across West Africa, North America, and parts of Europe. That was deeply rewarding.
Alis: What skills did that experience strengthen or develop for you?
Chiamaka: Journalism already requires curiosity, creativity, and relationship-building. But diaspora reporting pushed those skills further. These were people I had never met, contacts I had to build trust with virtually, in an age of scams and misinformation. I had to convince people to share deeply personal stories and trust that I would tell them responsibly.
I also learned patience in new ways. Under the guidance of my editor-in-chief, Musikilu Mojeed, I spent days reviewing hundreds of pages of immigration court documents just to produce a single story under 2,000 words. It was exhausting, but it sharpened my analytical skills and taught me discipline.
Looking back, I now see how all of that prepared me for the work I’m doing today.
Alis: You’ve since co-founded Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue Foundation. How did that come about?
Chiamaka: Interestingly, the seeds were planted long ago. My undergraduate thesis was on fake news, at a time when there were very few research materials on misinformation or disinformation. Back then, we called it “fake news,” and the global conversation hadn’t fully matured.
Two years ago, my co-founder, who has worked in media literacy for a long time, and I started having conversations about how misinformation was becoming a serious problem in Nigeria. People were sharing false information without questioning it. Confirmation bias was driving everything: if it aligned with your belief, it was true.
We didn’t want to sit around complaining. So we asked: What can we do? That led us back to media and information literacy, building people’s capacity to access, analyse, create, and share information ethically.
Alis: What does MILID Foundation focus on in practice?
Chiamaka: Media and information literacy intersects with everything: democracy, climate change, gender, health, conflict, artificial intelligence. Everyone is a publisher now. Gatekeeping has largely disappeared, and while technology has democratised information, it has also made harm easier.
At MILID, we focus especially on young people, because they make up the bulk of Nigeria’s population and are most active online. We ask them simple but powerful questions: You have smartphones, but are you using them smartly?
Our programmes focus on democracy and politics, climate and environmental literacy, sexual and reproductive health, gender, intercultural and interreligious dialogue, and AI literacy. Media literacy is prevention; fact-checking is a cure. We want to work upstream.
Alis: And you’ve achieved quite a lot in a short time.
Chiamaka: We started in March 2024, with no institutional funding. In eight months, we’ve trained over 200 young people across Nigeria. In October, through a partnership with UNESCO during Global Media and Information Literacy Week, we trained 10 youth-led organisations in north-west Nigeria, a region deeply affected by conflict and insecurity. That was a moment of real pride for us.
We’re also building partnerships with universities, state ministries, and international organisations. One university has invited us to co-develop a media literacy curriculum. We’re working on two research projects to be released early next year, and we’re supporting the establishment of the UNESCO Institute for Media and Information Literacy in Nigeria.
Alis: Some of your focus areas—gender and sexual reproductive health—can be sensitive in Nigeria. How are those conversations received?
Chiamaka: Intercultural and interreligious dialogue is generally easier. Gender and reproductive health are much harder. We live in a deeply patriarchal society. Conversations about contraception, for example, are often met with hostility, especially for unmarried women.
But these are exactly the conversations we must have. Media messages can fuel peace or violence, inclusion or exclusion. That’s why partnerships are central to our work. No single organisation can do this alone. We collaborate bottom-up and top-down, working with grassroots groups and large institutions like UNESCO.
Alis: Looking ahead, what is your vision for MILID?
Chiamaka: We want to become a go-to resource for media and information literacy and its intersection with other sectors, starting in Nigeria, but extending across Africa and beyond. Disinformation is not just an election problem; it affects diplomacy, conflict, health, and social cohesion.
As my mentor always says, “Are you writing for awards, or are you writing for impact?” For me, journalism—and this work—is about impact. Awards are nice, but they are not the measure of value.
If we can help build a more media-literate population, people who think critically and act responsibly, then we’ve done something meaningful.
Read Chiamaka’s stories here: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/author/chiamaka