• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Double honour as BusinessDay’s Odinaka Anudu wins Citi award, US IRT

Odinaka Anudu

BusinessDay journalist Odinaka Anudu has emerged as the winner of this year’s (CJEA). He also won a United States Department of State’s nomination for an International Reporting Tour in the United States and the Netherlands.

For the Citi award, Anudu emerged as the best with his feature story, ‘Dollar in the Mills’. This story chronicles how small-scale palm oil millers make money in spite of all the man-made gridlocks set on their way.

He was picked as the winner by a jury of eminent personalities from journalism and other disciplines.

Anudu, being the only winner in Nigeria, will join winners from other countries in New York for a once-in-a-lifetime eight-day seminar on business and financial reporting at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Citi Journalistic Excellence Award (CJEA) began in 1982 as a way of recognising journalists for excellence in financial and business reporting. It  is sponsored by Citi Bank and administered by Columbia Journalism School.

For the International Reporting Tour, Anudu was selected after submitting some of his award-winning stories that centred on entrepreneurship, manufacturing and economy to the Washington Foreign Press Centre, US Department of State. He is one of 20 journalists selected from across the world.

He will participate in the reporting tour in Washington DC and Chicago in the US, before jetting out to Hague, the Netherlands, for the 2019 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which will bring together 2,000 global leaders in entrepreneurship, innovation, investment and policy to support deals that matter to everyone.

Odinaka Anudu, BusinessDay’s Senior Editorial Analyst, edits the Industry and SMEs sections, supervising a widely-read section produced every Monday called ‘Start-Up Digest’. He has won a number of local and international journalism awards, fellowships and grants. Internally, he won the 2018 BusinessDay Top Performer for the Editorial Department, making him the best journalist for the newspaper last year.

He has won some nominations outside Nigeria, notable among which was his 2017 selection by the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, for a fully-funded investigation in Guateng.

Anudu is a trained economist and philosopher. He is also an entrepreneur, public speaker and former school teacher. He was educated at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, and briefly trained at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). He was formerly the secretary-general of the National Drug Abuse Control Association. He has received several training programmes in journalism, locally and internationally. He has two books to his credit, ‘Top-Class English for Schools and Colleges’ (2009) and ‘Drug Abuse and Our Future: Who Will Bell the Cat?’ (2010).

In its tradition, BusinessDay has produced other award-winning journalists, including Patrick Atuanya (editor), Chuka Uroko, Obinna Emelike, Iheanyi Nwachukwu, Daniel Obi, Teliat Sule, Josephine Okojie, Isaac Anyaogu, and Caleb Ojewale, among many others.

BusinessDay is Nigeria’s leading business and financial newspaper, covering business, finance, economy, banking, politics, health and arts, among others.