Precinct Fellow Awarded Amnesty International Film Prize
Presidential Precinct’s 2017 Mandela Washington Fellow, Temitope Kalejaiye is an Amnesty International award-winning broadcast journalist and children’s rights advocate. Her documentary “Almajiri is Begging” (2015) explores the unpromising fate of young children in northern Nigeria sent away to Koranic schools and forced into begging.
On June 30, the documentary was screened for the 2017 Mandela Washington Fellows and guests during a visit from the Special Adviser for Global Youth Issues at the US Department of State, Andy Rabens. Following the screening, Fellows participated in a thoughtful discussion on poverty and extremist exploitation of youth in sub-Saharan Africa.
Temi has been featured in The Guardian for winning the student award in the annual Amnesty Media Awards, which recognizes excellence in human rights reporting. She has a BSc in Mass Communication from Ahmadu Bellow University Zaria, Nigeria and an MA in Broadcast Journalism from Nottingham Trent University, UK. After witnessing the stark economic disparities between children in the UK and those in her home country of Nigeria, and was inspired to use her communication skills to narrow the poverty gap for Nigerian children.
