Robert Powell
Robert Powell is a veteran news agency and newspaper journalist who has spent much of his working life in Africa.
He has been training journalists across the continent for the past 10 years for the Thomson Foundation, IRIN and International Alert.
Robert is no stranger to Nigeria. He worked as a teacher in Sagamu, Ogun State in the late 1970s before turning to a career in journalism.
After 16 years reporting on Africa, Latin America and Portugal for Reuters, he joined The Herald newspaper in Glasgow Scotland in 1995 as business editor.
Robert left IRIN in 2005 to become a free-lance international journalist and media consultant. He is now based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Robert set up the Budget Monitoring Project for the BBC World Service Trust in April 2006.
Kingsley Uranta
Kingsley Uranta always dreamed of being on television when he was a young boy in Rivers State and training as a journalist enabled him to meet that goal.
He started off at NTA in 1989 and became one of three founder members of Channels Television in Lagos three years later.
Kingsley won the National Media Merit Award for Best TV journalist in 1994.
Following a two-year interlude as British American Tobacco’s public relations manager in Nigeria, Kingsley moved to AIT in 2002, becoming General Manager News.
He is now on secondment to the BBC World Service Trust as Coordinator of the Budget Monitoring Project.
Kingsley became the Head of Project of the Nigeria Budget Monitoring Project when Robert Powell's contract ran out in 2007. He managed the project securing a six months extension. He also worked as a journalist trainer.
The Project ended in September 2008.
Gabriel Aduda
Gabriel Aduda is the Head of Governance Research and Consulting at Integrity, a Nigerian NGO that fights corruption and promotes good governance.
He coordinated all activities in the Budget Monitoring Project related to the empowerment of civil society organisations and the promotion of a constructive dialogue between civil society, the media and government.
Gabriel has been heavily involved in promoting clean and accountable government in Nigeria ever since he graduated from the University of Ibadan with a masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning in 1998.
He served as an executive member of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) for four years before joining Integrity in 2005.
Gabriel has undertaken extensive consultancy work with the World Bank and over the past eight years he has published a series of research documents on corruption, fiscal transparency and good governance in Nigeria.
He has travelled extensively in Africa and beyond during the course of his work and has undertaken two periods of study at universities in the United States.
But his life nearly turned out to be very different.
As a young man Gabriel was intent on joining the navy.
Ibim Semenitari
Ibim Semenitari is an award winning investigative journalist and editor who has worked for 17 years with some of Nigeria's leading titles.
She won the CNN African Journalist of the Year award in 1997 for her reports in the Nigerian print media.
Ibim took a degree in English at university and then plunged straight into journalism.
Her career has taken her from the Daily Times newspaper, through Newswatch magazine to the Tell group.
There she launched a new weekly business magazine, The Broad Street Journal, in 2005.
Ibim has contributed as a resource person to journalism training workshops organized by UNICEF, the World Bank and International Labour Organisation (ILO).
Pina Abdu
Pinado Abdu worked as the project assistant, the silent unseen person whose hard work ensures that everything happens when it is supposed to and that our suppliers are paid on time.
She graduated from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria with a degree in Mass Communication in 2004 and has worked since then in radio, television and newspapers.
Pina, as she is universally known, was a presenter with ABU Campus Radio in Zaria during her studies.
She went on to work as a television journalist with NTA in Jos during her National Youth Service year.
Pina then worked briefly with Leadership as a newspaper reporter in Abuja before joining the BBC World Service Trust in 2006.
Although her tasks are mainly administrative and organisational, she displayed a thorough understanding of the media and what journalists (and their trainers) required to function properly.
Pina plans to return to active journalism in due course.
She loves to travel and everything indicates she is going to go far in life.
Paul Imisi
Paul Imisi, the project webmaster, is a self taught IT expert and digital illustrator.
He started off designing business cards, pamphlets, signs and banners to be printed in the conventional manner, but quickly turned to computers and the internet.
Paul started using computers for design work in 1993 and quickly became interested in the internet.
He built his first website in 1997 and rapidly acquired expertise as a website and software developer.
Paul moved from to Abuja in 2001 and since then has worked on website development for Micro Access, the Internet Service Provider and has acted as a Web application developer, IT consultant and project manager for Alteq, the internet and computer consulting company. He has also worked as a web developer for the Federal Government’s Debt Management Office. He has also designed and developed web applications, in conjunction with a few IT firms and government establishments, for use on some large and small scale projects.
Paul began building the Budget Monitoring Project website is July 2006 and was in charge of administering the project’s iLearn (online learning programme).
Goddy Ikeh
Goddy Ikeh is a veteran financial journalist who has been Business Editor of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) since 1999.
His 26-year career at NAN has been interspersed with spells working as the Nigerian correspondent of the OPEC news agency OPECNA and as press secretary for two Nigerian finance ministers.
Goddy has travelled widely to Europe and North America in the course of his official duties and has become an expert on the Nigerian oil industry. He published a book about the evolution of the country’s petroleum sector in 1991.
After obtaining a degree in Sociology at the University of Ibadan in 1979, he joined NAN as a cub reporter.
But for several years now, Goddy has been using his vast experience of economic and business journalism to train other Nigerian reporters.
Vincent Nwanma
Vincent Nwanma is a Nigerian journalist who became so interested in business that he nearly became a stockbroker instead.
He took a degree in economics at the University of Nsukka – where Charles Soludo, the current Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, was his classmate - and went on to study journalism at Columbia University in New York.
Vincent began his career as a reporter writing for the Concord Press in Lagos. He has been writing about finance, oil and commodities in West Africa for the past 20 years
He branched into international journalism by writing reports on Nigeria for Inter Press Service and went on to work for the Dow Jones financial news service in Ghana and Nigeria.
It was in Ghana that Vincent passed his exams to qualify as a stockbroker, but he decided to stick to writing instead.
He published a book on investment called “Creating Wealth through the Stock Market” in 2005. He is currently working on a new guide book for business journalists in West Africa.
Jika Attoh
Jika Attoh has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a radio and television broadcaster and lecturer in journalism.
He worked with NTA, Channels Television and African Independent for many years before moving on to become chief executive of the Enugu-based private radio station Cosmo FM in 2003.
Jika took a degree in English at the University of Ife in 1980 and went on to do a Masters in Mass Communication at the University of Lagos Media School.
He then taught for many years at the College of Journalism and the Nigerian Institute of Journalism in Lagos while he pursued his parallel career as a television reporter and presenter.
Jika’s clear and polished spoken English received further refinement when he won a Reuters Foundation scholarship to study for two years at the UK’s prestigious Oxford University in 1993.
He received a doctorate in cross-cultural communication from Oxford in 1995.
Kieran Cooke
Kieran Cooke was born in London and has spent many years working for the BBC, the Financial Times and the Independent newspaper. But don’t make the mistake of calling him English.
Kieran is Irish and proud of it!
He spent many years working as a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia, reporting on political and economic affaires in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
He has also lived and worked in Greece and Ireland.
Kieran now works as a free-lance reporter and journalism trainer, specialising in financial affairs, development issues and the environment. He has run several several journalism training workshops in Eastern Europe and Africa.
Alongside his journalism work, Kieran is studying energy and environmental issues at Oxford University in southern England.
He lives with his wife and two sons in a nearby village – but still likes to get back to his remote cottage in the west of Ireland whenever he can!
Keith Hayes
Keith Hayes has been a radio and television broadcaster in the UK and North America for more than 40 years.
During his career, he has held senior editorial positions with the BBC, Reuters Television, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and several other broadcasters. He was the first head of news of the UK commercial radio station BRMB.
Keith has served as the anchorman for several television news programmes and has written a guide book for trainee television journalists called “Pay Attention Please.”
He began training other journalists in the early 1990s. Since then he has travelled the world organising courses and workshops in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia.
For two years Keith ran a US-financed programme to develop independent media in the former Yugoslav territory of Kosovo.
He now lives in Lewes in southeast England, but is still very much on the move. Keith spends two months each year training journalists at Russia Today Television, an English language TV news channel based in Moscow.
Martin Mulligan
Martin Mulligan has been a business journalist for over 20 years and has travelled widely across the globe.
Most of his career has been spent with the Financial Times, where he is now a senior sub-editor.
Martin has covered a wide range of reporting briefs, including UK news, companies and features.
He has travelled regularly to Africa as both a reporter and journalism traine. He has also worked extensively in Eastern Europe, India, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.
Martin is particularly interested in the development of the internet and the adoption of new technology in developing countries. He has written extensively about these issues.
Martin has been training journalists in developing countries regularly since 1995.
He is Vice-President of the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association and a member of the editorial board of The Round Table, a London-based journal of international affairs.
He lives in Oxfordshire in southern England with his wife Clare and son Matthew.
Jeff Phillips
Jeff Phillips is a veteran broadcaster who has worked extensively as a reporter and journalism trainer in Africa and the Middle East.
After 15 years as a free-lance journalist in Beirut, Cairo, Khartoum and Washington, he formally joined the BBC World Service in 1993.
Jeff ran a series of training courses for BBC reporters and correspondents in Amman, Cairo, Nairobi and London and rose to become News and Current Affairs Editor for the Africa and Middle East Region..
Since he retired in 2003, Jeff has worked intensively as a journalism trainer for the BBC World Service Trust.
He spent eight weeks training journalists in Nigeria in 2003 and went on to spend two years as co-director of a major journalism training programme in the Sudan.
Apart from having a broad interest in the politics, economics and social development of Africa and the Arab world, Jeff has long held specific interests in energy and water. Both are fundamental concerns influencing the strategic relationship between states in these regions.
Like many other journalists concerned with Africa and the Middle East, he has developed an interest in the place of Islam in Britain and the struggle of Muslim immigrants and their children to find a personal identity in a predominantly Christian country.
Jeff also has a passion for photography, archaeology and walking. In recent years he has indulged these interests in Scotland and the remote islands off its coast.
Bill McArthur
Bill McArthur works regularly as a cartoonist for The Herald newspaper of Scotland, the Financial Times of London and a string of other publications.
He was acclaimed Scottish Cartoonist of the Year in 2002 and again in 2005.
After studying art at Edinburgh College of Art, Billl took a degree in Fine Art at Edinburgh University in 1963. He went on to set up a successful printing business in the Scottish capital.
But in 1977 he turned his back on the city to opt for the rural life instead.
Bill bought a cottage on the remote island of Sanday in the Orkney Islands to the north of Scotland and moved there with his family to become a fisherman.
He began publishing cartoons in between his fishing expeditions in 1988 when he started a weekly cartoon for the magazine Fishing News.
Four years later he began contributing cartoons to The Herald, Scotland’s largest circulation quality newspaper. He went on to become its principal cartoonist.
Bill has now abandoned commercial fishing to become a full-time cartoonist, but still enjoys the odd trip out to sea to provide for the family table.
You can see samples of his published cartoons by clicking on the following link: http://illustration-agency.com/gallery/humour/mcarthur.htm
Bill’s children have grown up and are spread across Scotland, but he and his wife Sue continue to live in Sanday, a small windswept island of 400 people with two pubs, pristine sandy beaches and a lot of sheep. Their “electronic croft” is connected to the rest of the world by a fast internet link.
Phil West
Phil West is an expert in computer graphics and newspaper design. He teaches degree courses in media design at South Tyneside College and the University of Sunderland in northeast England.
Many of his former students are now graphic designers with national newspapers and television stations in the UK, the United States and Canada.
Phil has been teaching art and design at higher education colleges in Newcastle for the past 25 years.
He is an acknowledged expert in all aspects of graphic and typographic design, newspaper design, infographics, creative illustration, drawing and painting.
Besides teaching, Phil also runs a design consultancy called West1 Design. This handles everything from medical illustrations to the creation of company websites and image makeovers for newspapers and magazines.
Phil has been personally involved with redesigns of The Times and Sunday Times in London.
Although he is now mainly focussed on media work, Phil began his career in 1968, designing and illustrating labels and packaging for Scotch whisky bottles in Glasgow.