Jeff Koinange is the Chief Reporter and talk show host for Kenya’s first ever 24-hour All-news Tv station, K24. In only a year and a half of being on-air, K24 has already been honored with a CNN / Multichoice African Journalist of the Year award as well as two prestigious awards from the Martin Luther King Foundation-  one for the station and one for the talk show, Capital Talk, a daily half-hour one-on-one talk show hosted by Jeff.

Jeff was CNN’s Africa Correspondent for six years, responsible for reporting from across the African continent. Since joining CNN in 2001, he covered a wide range of African issues and events with a dedication and professional impartiality while using his experience to report on topic sympathetically.

He has reported on major events from all across the African continent. These have included the violent civil war that led to the overthrow of Charles Taylor in Liberia- where he secured an exclusive interview with the outgoing president- to the subsequent inauguration of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia as Africa’s first female-elected president, and the arrest and deportation of Charles Taylor.  He reported from Sudan on the crisis in Darfur and also from Uganda on the refugees who suffered the Lords Resistance Army. He covered Nigeria extensively, its politics, its economy and its people and traveled extensively to numerous other African countries reflecting life on the continent to CNN’s global audience.

Although Jeff was CNN’s Africa Correspondent, his journalistic talents meant he frequently reported from outside the continent. In 2005, he was part of CNN’s Peabody Award winning team that covered the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. He also reported from Baghdad on the post-war insurgency, reconstruction and the historic elections in Iraq in 2005.

 

Other significant events Jeff covered during his time with CNN included the US President, George W Bush’s Africa tour, the first by a

sitting US Republican President; the ten-year anniversary of the Genocide that killed up to a million people in a hundred days of savage slaughter in Rwanda; Africa’s preparation and anticipation of the FIFA World Cup’s debut on the African continent in 2010; elections and politics in Zimbabwe, Congo, Sierra Leone and Somalia; troop deployments in the War on Terror in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa; the attempted coup and evacuation of French and American civilians in the Ivory Coast as well as the ensuing peace talks; and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa.

In 2005 Jeff won a Television Emmy (the only Kenyan to have ever won one) for coverage of the devastating famine in the West African nation of Niger. Other awards included the George Foster PEABODY award for his coverage of the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2006, the Vernon Jarrett Bronze Medal in both 2006 and 2007 for ‘Best Feature’ on ‘Mass Rapes in the Congo’ and ‘Famine in Malawi’ respectively.

 

In 2006, Jeff was awarded the Prix Bayeaux for War Correspondents for his reporting on the civil war in the Congo. And in both 2006 and 2007 he was a finalist of the Diageo Awards for Business Reporting in Africa.

Prior to joining CNN, Jeff worked for Reuters Television from 1995 to 2001, covering the majority of the African continent from bases in Nairobi, Abidjan and Johannesburg.

Jeff holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism from New York University.