She will begin her new position on December 19 and will oversee all Voice of America content and staff on the African continent.
Launched in 1942, Voice of America (VOA) is an international multimedia broadcaster that offers services in more than 40 languages to a weekly global audience estimated at more than 311 million people, VOA provides news, information and cultural programming via the Internet, mobile and social media, radio and television. VOA is funded by the U.S. government through the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
VOA’s Africa division is one of VOA’s largest. Serving sub-Saharan Africa on radio, television and digital media, it reaches a weekly audience of nearly 70 million people.
As the new director of Voice of America’s Africa division, Salwa Jaafari, a VOA news executive since 2015, will oversee all of VOA’s television, radio and web content and coverage for Africa, as well as the Africa division’s staff of more than 500 journalists in the U.S. and around the world.
Author of many hard-hitting stories
Prior to her appointment, Salwa Jaafari was an executive producer on the VOA French-to-Africa news team, responsible for television programming to French-speaking Africa. She began her journalistic career in 2001 at Reuters news agency, where she worked part-time while finishing her Masters degree. A year later, she joined the Moroccan television channel “2m TV”, where she started by presenting the daily press review and the news in French, before starting to work on major reports. She has produced a dozen long-form investigative reports for the program “Grand Angle”, including one on illegal immigration for which she won the CNN “African journalist of the year” award in 2016.
Among her most outstanding reports, the one she did in Iran following the earthquake that hit the city of Bam, or the one on the famine that affected the Niger Delta in 2004. Her investigation into the problem of transmission of nationality from mother to son in Morocco was one of the reasons why the Moroccan government approved the law that allowed mothers to transfer their nationality to their offspring.
Foray into diplomacy
In 2005, Salwa Jaafari left the world of television for the world of diplomacy. Recruited by the US Embassy in Rabat to give a boost to its public relations department, she supervised many projects and events, such as the launch of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the visit of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, that of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and that of President George W. Bush to the Emirates.
Back in the media world
Salwa Jaafari returned to the media world in 2009, taking over the French-speaking editorial staff of the television channel “Medi 1 TV”. She then left Morocco to move to the United States, where she worked as a reporter for Agence France-Presse and producer for Skynews Arabia.
Salwa Jaafari is fluent in French, Arabic and English. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Linguistics and a Master’s degree in English.
Yolanda López, VOA’s interim director, said, “We are delighted to welcome Salwa Jaafari to VOA’s senior management team and are excited about the energy and focus on excellence she will bring to the leadership of the Africa division.
