Zaina Adamu

Zaina Adamu

Zaina Adamu is a global communications expert with over 10 years of experience working in media, international affairs and human rights. In 2018, she founded Ghana Girl Rising, a social enterprise aimed at improving education access for Ghana’s marginalized young women. Before then, she was a journalist at CNN, covering both the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

During her six-year tenure at CNN, she won a Peabody Award for her contribution to the network’s reporting of the Arab Spring and was selected as a Power 30 Under 30 honoree. As news editor for The Spokesman, she won an Excellence Award for her breaking news coverage of President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 win. More recently, she was appointed by the European Council on Foreign Relations to the Panel of Experts for Africa where she serves as a policy consultant on foreign affairs in Ghana.

Zaina is the author of 20,000 Words: A Guide to Finding Calm in a Cluttered World. She currently serves on the Boards of Harvard W3D: Women in Defense, Diplomacy, and Development and G-100, an influential group of 100 women leaders from across the world.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism from Morgan State University and a Master’s degree in International Education Policy from Harvard.