Chikaodinaka Sandra Oduah was born on March 14, 1986 to Dr. Emmanuel and Mercy Oduah in Ogbaru, Anambra State, Nigeria. Oduah is an Igbo by ethnicity. She is the oldest of seven children of their parents. When she was two years old, her family relocated to Metro Atlanta in the United States.
Oduah has experience as a television news producer, correspondent, writer, and photographer. She is an American journalist of Nigerian descent. She works as a correspondent for VICE News at the moment. Oduah is renowned for her distinctive, anthropologically-informed, human-focused ethnographic reporting style,
She was the first foreign journalist to visit and spend a significant amount of time in the isolated town of Chibok following the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by the terrorist organisation Boko Haram in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria.
In order to depict the intricacies, dreams, and everyday realities of Africans and people of African heritage, Oduah’s reporting entails an examination of culture, history, war, human rights, and development.
Chika began working as a staff reporter for VOX newspaper while still in high school, focusing in particular on stories involving immigrants and refugees in Atlanta.
She studied film, anthropology, and broadcast journalism between 2004 and 2008 at Georgia State University, where she also earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in anthropology and broadcast journalism. She wrote for the Signal Newspaper, contributed to WRAS Album 88.5FM, and served as vice president of the university’s chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists while a student at Georgia State University. She also graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2010, where she studied broadcast journalism and earned a Master of Science degree.
Oduah was employed in 2004 at the Center for Pan-Asian Community Services in Doraville, Georgia, where she provided refugee teenagers from Bosnia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Sudan with education.
Awards and Recognitions
The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Daily Beast, CNN, and The Huffington Post are just a few of the prestigious media outlets that have featured Chika Oduah’s work.
She received the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Trust Women “Journalist of The Year Award” in 2014 for her exhaustive and first-hand reporting on the mass kidnapping.
She received the 2015 African Story Challenge Award from the African Media Initiative and the International Center for Journalists for her reporting on the fallout from a lead poisoning outbreak in Nigeria in 2010. This same project earned her the Dow Technology & Innovation Reporting Award at the 2016 CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards.
She was named one of “Nigeria’s 100 Most Inspirational Women” by YNaija on March 8, 2016, before winning the category at the eleventh edition of The Future Awards and receiving the EbonyLife Prize for Journalism. In cooperation with the United Nations Fund, the International Center for Journalists announced her as the first recipient of the Young Reporter for a Sustainable Future Award in September 2016.
She was given the 2018 Percy Qoboza Award, which is given out annually by The National Association of Black Journalists in the United States to the journalist who best embodies Percy Qoboza’s spirit.
