Mr. Eric Chinje recipient of the Goodwill Ambassador for V.K. Nyambi foundation during his sendoff party sponsor by the World Bank Staff, the V. K. Nyambi foundation and the Hampton Conference Center December 11th 2011.

Biography
Mr. Eric Chinje is currently the Director for Strategic Communications at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, a position he took up at the start of 2012.
Prior to that he led the Global Media Program at the World Bank Institute (WBI) and, in that capacity, launched the IMAGE (Independent Media for Accountability, Governance and Empowerment) capacity building program and Network to create a corps of development journalists in the Bank’s client countries (see: www.image-network.org).

He moved to the WBI from his position as External Affairs and Communications Manager in the Bank’s Africa Region and the institution’s spokesperson on Africa. He returned to the World Bank in 2008 after four years at the African Development Bank in Tunis where he was head of that institution’s External Affairs and Communications Unit. He is on the Board of the African Media Initiative (AMI) which he was instrumental in establishing, and is a Founding Co-Convenor of the African Media Leaders Forum (AMLF). He is Vice President of the African Advisory Board of the National Museum of African Art of the prestigious Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

Mr. Chinje is fluent in English and French, He studied in the universities of Yaounde (Cameroon), Syracuse (New York) and Harvard (Cambridge, Massachusetts). He lectured in the Yaounde University School of Mass Communication in Cameroon during the 1984/85 academic year. He served as Vice Chair of the World Bank/IMF Africa Club from 1996 – 2002. He was Editor in Chief of Cameroon Television and, at various times from 1984 – 1991, a contributing correspondent for CNN World Report, and a stringer for the BBC World Service, Voice of America, and Deutschewelle Radio.

Mr. Chinje is an Officer of the Cameroon Order of Merit and an Officer of the Dutch Order of Orange Nassau. He is a founding member of the Women’s Economic Empowerment Network (WEEN), a non-governmental organization in Cameroon, and Chair of the Zambia Orphans AID (ZOA) organization. He serves on the board of FORCE (the Forsachi Resource Center) in Cameroon, and the “ARK Jammers Connection” – a not-for-profit musical organization in the US that engages in Acts of Random Kindness (ARK). In this capacity, he co-conveived and oversaw the implementation of the |Ancestry Reconnection Program (ARP) – a journey back to the land of their ancestors by DNA-certified African Americans. Mr. Chinje has written and lectured extensively on Communication and Development in Africa.