Ida Jooste

Background

About Ida Jooste

Based in South Africa, Ida Jooste, Internews’ Global Health Advisor, is an award-winning journalist, media technical expert and seasoned manager with over 25 years' experience. She has been in leadership positions of both newsrooms and media development projects since 1996. Ms. Jooste led Internews’ Kenya Health Media project from 2006-2014. As Country Director she was responsible for design, implementation, and overall project management as well as ensuring compliance with USAID requirements. Through her leadership, vision, and direction, she steered the program’s Kenyan team on a PEPFAR-funded health journalism program to respond to the post-election crisis; and out of that developed additional streams of programs dealing with conflict mitigation, land reform, marginalized groups including LGBTI, broad based human rights and fair election coverage. She also led an innovative data journalism training program and introduced media training initiatives on road safety and the extractives industry in Kenya. In addition, Ms. Jooste broadened the scope of these programs to respond to developments in the media landscape, strategically engaging senior level journalists, media managers, and government officials. With more than 20 years’ experience as a journalist in various parts of Africa, she has an innate understanding of intercultural communications and journalism support appropriate to settings in the developing world. Her journalistic work across Africa has focused on governance issues, corruption, transparency, human rights, health/HIV and investigative and analytical storytelling aimed and better educating the public and ensuring the voices of citizens are heard. As Internews senior health media advisor, she is working with partner HC3 on the Ebola and post-Ebola response in West Africa, and with AVAC, helping the media in priority countries in Sub-Saharan Africa create an enabling environment for HIV biomedical prevention research to thrive.