Kenyan TV presenter, Waihiga Mwaura has been named the recipient of the 2018 BBC World News Komla Dumor Award.
The award was created to honour Ghanaian born journalist, Komla Dumor, who was a presenter for BBC World News. Komla died suddenly aged 41 in 2014.
Waihiga Mwaura is a presenter on Kenya’s Citizen TV and he anchors the Friday evening news bulletin. He is also presenter of Daybreak, a daily breakfast show on the same channel.
He becomes the very first male recipient of the prestigious Award which was created to recognize African journalists who have done exceptionally well in telling the African story, like Komla did. Mwaura is the fourth individual to receive the Award after Uganda’s Nancy Kacungira who was the pioneering recipient in 2015, then Didi Akinyelure and Amina Yuguda both of them from Nigeria.
Mwaura is a 2015 Mohammed Amin Africa award winner, 2012 CNN MultiChoice Africa award winner and a three-time Media Council of Kenya AJEA nominee.
He is also recipient of the Mohammed Amin Africa Award for an investigative story he worked on to expose doping in Kenya.
In response to winning the Komla Dumor Award, the Kenyan journalist said: “Komla Dumor meant a lot of things to me as a journalist and as an individual”.
“If I can only achieve just 10 or 20% of what he did, I feel like I would have made my contribution to journalism. As an African, I feel proud to have the opportunity to be able to tell the African story to audiences across the world,” he added.
According to the BBC, Mwaura impressed the panel with his story-telling ability and on-screen presence.
As part of the prize, he will spend three months at the BBC in London and travel back to the continent to report on a story there.