The Danny Faure Foundation’s first Media Awards |01 April 2022
Meet the panel of judges
The Danny Faure Foundation has announced the panel of judges for its first Media Awards promoting Transparency, Accountability and Good Governance.
The chief executive of the Seychelles Media Commission, Ibrahim Afif, will chair the panel which is independent of the Danny Faure Foundation. The other members of the panel are Marie-France Watson, Shella Mohideen, Oliver Steeds, Ambassador Ronny Jumeau, Misako Ito and Dr Olga Klymenko. (Accompanying the article are brief bios of each member of the panel).
The Danny Faure Foundation Media Award was launched on January 15 this year to recognise journalists and media organisations whose journalistic works have contributed towards promoting Transparency, Accountability and Good Governance.
The deadline for journalists to submit their works for the Award was yesterday, March 31, 2022.
The Award has four categories comprising print, radio, television and digital media.
The winner of each category will receive a cash prize of R25,000.
The Award ceremony will be held on May 3, 2022 to coincide with World Press Freedom Day.
Members of the panel
Ibrahim Afif is the CEO of the Seychelles Media Commission (SMC), a post he has held since its coming into existence in February 2010.
Mr Afif’s media career spans some 45 years. He officially joined the Public Service as a Radio Producer with the then Radio Seychelles in
January 1977, although he had previously worked there as an intern. He was promoted to Head of Radio News and Current Affairs in
September 1979. Six months after the commencement of Television in 1983 he was appointed Controller TV, a position held until January
1986 when he was called upon to set up the first Media School in Seychelles, within the Seychelles Polytechnic. He returned to the then RTS in May 1988 to take up the position of Assistant Director News for Radio and TV. When the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) was created on May 1, 1992, he was appointed its first managing director – a position retained for 17½ years until he was asked to set up the SMC in October 2009.
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Marie-France Watson has been engaged in the media sector for over a decade. She was one of the creators of the monthly POTPOURRI magazine and served the role of Chief Editor for the five years which the magazine published. In recent years she has been running a communications and PR consultancy, serving several clients in the tourism and environment fields. Her work ensured that she keeps
close relations with media houses in the country.
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Shella Mohideen was recently appointed as Chief Secretary of the Public Service Bureau. Prior to her appointment she was the Executive Director of The Guy Morel Institute where she was the lead person in developing and facilitating a training programme on Transparency, Accountability and Good Governance for public servants. Mrs Mohideen’s career in the education sector spans over 25
years. Dean of Faculty at the University of Seychelles and Principal of the School of Advanced Level Studies (Sals) are among various leadership positions and milestones in her career. In 2017 she was awarded Indian Ocean Countries and Country Winner of Africa’s Most Influential Women in Business and Government for Education and Training.
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Oliver Steeds is the founder, Chief Executive and Mission Director of Nekton – with a mission to explore and protect the ocean. Oliver is a submersible pilot and a ‘leading ocean explorer’ (Economist). His missions have helped protect an area of ocean equivalent to twice the size of Germany, discover the Rariphotic Zone (the largest new ecosystem found in decades) and have pioneered live submersible broadcasting including the first subsea documentary series,
Presidential Address and newscasts – all from Seychelles. Nekton have received multiple awards including from the Royal Television Society, IBC, Ocean Awards and BETT, the latter for pioneering live STEM broadcasts from the ocean.
Prior to Nekton, Oliver was a critically acclaimed international investigative journalist (with NBC, ABC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, Newsweek), and presenter of major historical, investigative and adventure series for Discovery Channels and
others. His expeditions, reporting and adventures have been in over 120 countries (arrested in nearly a dozen). He is also the co-founder of the educational non-profit, Encounter EDU and the Ocean’s Academy and, occasionally, gets sea-sick.
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Ambassador Ronny Jumeau is a former cabinet minister and Ambassador of the Republic of Seychelles. Previously in his career he was a journalist and Chief Editor of the Seychelles NATION daily newspaper. He has held several ministerial posts from 1998-2007 and was before that Cabinet Secretary in the President’s Office from 1992-1998. He was twice Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Ambassador to the United States and Canada and Ambassador to Brazil, Cuba and Jamaica. In between, he was Roving Ambassador for Climate Change and Small Island Developing State Issues. Ambassador Jumeau represented Small
Island Developing States (SIDS) on the Green Climate Fund (GCF) board, the world’s largest fund helping developing countries address climate change. He has been Chair of SIDS DOCK, the SIDS’ global sustainable energy and climate resilience organisation since 2018 and is also its Roving Ambassador for the Ocean. He represented Seychelles in the Global Island Partnership (GLISPA) in 2007-2021, chairing it from 2013 to 2015. Ambassador Jumeau retired from public service in 2021. He is currently a private consultant and advisor working with both government and civil society nationally and internationally on climate change, conservation, sustainable development, and the ocean from an island perspective.
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Misako Ito is a specialist of information and communication with 17 years of experience working in the UN and development organisations in Africa, Europe, Arab States and Asia. As Regional Adviser for Communication and Information at UNESCO Office in Nairobi, she manages UNESCO’s programme on access to
information, freedom of expression and digital transformation. She also advises on policy and strategy for safeguarding documentary heritage in Africa through UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme. She is a Japanese national and holds an Engineering Degree and a Master’s Degree in Information Systems and
Technology Management from HEC School of Management and Mines ParisTech in France. During the post-Arab Spring period, she advised the governments of Morocco and Tunisia for the reform of the media sector, the legislation on freedom of information and the participation of women and youth in public policies.
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Dr Olga Klymenko has been living and working in Seychelles since 2014. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Languages and Media, University of Seychelles. Dr Klymenko lectures, develops academic programmes, does research and coordinates teaching and learning. Her academic scope is sociolinguistic in nature. Among various societal aspects of language, she focuses on how meaning is generated and communicated through different media, and what effect mediated messages produce on their audience.
From 2017-2019 she coordinated the development and validation of the Diploma in Journalism, the first local programme of such academic level in the field. Since 2019 Dr Klymenko has been heading the delivery of this programme to the first cohort of journalism students at UniSey. In this role she collaborates with media outlets and practitioners, and participate on a number of boards to evaluate students’ production in print, broadcast and new media journalism.