Manuela Huyghues Despointes is a Knight Development Journalism Fellow who will work with a leading news organization in Senegal’s capital city, Dakar, to improve and expand coverage of poverty-related issues and bring news of rural areas to the national agenda. The project begins in February 2010.
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Create new networks linking professional journalists at major news outlets with local and citizen journalists in rural areas via mobile technology. The new teams will focus on issues such as agriculture, rural development, sanitation and microfinance.
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Huyghues Despointes is a senior journalist with extensive experience as a training consultant in several African countries. Most recently, she completed a two-year assignment overseeing an ICFJ project that focused on elections coverage in Guinea.
She began her journalism career more than 15 years ago as a freelancer in France, where she covered social and international topics. She then spent four years working at a Paris radio station, specializing in covering conflict and overseeing reports on global humanitarian issues. In 2002, Huyghues Despointes spent a year in Argentina as the correspondent for Figaro. Since that time, she has worked as head producer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Radio Okapi (Foundation Hirondelle/Monuc), as a trainer for NATO in Afghanistan, and as a photojournalist specializing in children’s issues for UNICEF in Burkina Faso.
Huyghues Despointes has a Master’s degree in literature from the Sorbonne in Paris and attended the graduate school of journalism in Paris. Contact: mdespointes@knight.icfj.org